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WILLIAM CULLEN liRVANT, 



POETS' HOMES. 



PEN AND PENCIL SKETCHES 



AMERICAN POETS AND THEIR HOMES. 



ARTHUR OILMAN AND OTHERS. 



:>*i»j. 



X ^ S^^>^. '^*^cor>'«'<^^^^^ 



V VV-'*'^ ^V 

V//y 1880 .s»/ 

BOSTON: 
D. LOTHROP AND COMPANY, 

FRAXKLIN ST., CORNER OF HAWLEY. 



COPYRIGHT BY 

D. LOTHROP Ll CO. 
1879. 



Y& 



■A\ 






CONTENTS 



Oliver Wendell Holmes 

Walt Whitman 

Joaquin Miller 

Elizabeth Stuart Phelps 

William Culll.n Drvant 

Nora Perry 

Ralph Waldo Emerson . 

Paul H. PIayne 

J. Poyle O'Reilly . 

Rr.v. Dr. S. F. Smiph 



7 

35 
60 

loS 



17- 



190 



OLIVER WENDELL HOI-MES. 

AS I write, my eye wanders occasionally from the 
paper, and I look out of my library window 
towards the Washington Elm, beyond which I see a 
straight path across the Common that seems to end a1 
the door of a great gambrel-roofed house. It is his- 
toric ground. Under that aged elm tree the Father 
of his Country first drew his sword as Commander-in- 
Chief of the army that won freedom for the United 
States, and on that Common the brave soldiers who 
composed the patriot army encamped after the battle 
of Lexington. Of one of these scenes Dr. Holmes 
wrote in 1S75 : 



8 Poets' Homes. 

" Just on this very blessed spot, 

The summer leaves below, 
Defore his homespun ranks arrayed. 
In green New England's elm-bough shade 
The great Virginian drew the blade 

King George full soon should know.'" 

Between the Common and the house with the gam- 
biel roof lies the road on which the red-coats marched, 
all confident and proud, as they started for Lexington 
and Concord one April morning in 1775, and down 
which, all humble and sore, they hurried, pressed by 
the militia-men, as they retreated towards Boston the 
same afternoon, after their astonishing defeat. 

Many a tourist has stopped under the venerable 
elm, and has read the inscription on the granite mon- 
ument telling the simple story of how the hero hon- 
ored the tree. Many a visitor gazes at the ancient 
house, too, but he does not honor it because it was 
the home of " Mr Hastings," or the quarters of the 
" Committee of Safety," and of General Ward, a hun- 
dred and thr^ee years ago. No, he does homage to 
the spirit of patriotism and the glory of war on this 
side of the Common ; and when he crosses the straight 
path, over which my errant eyes so often wander, he 
thinks of a gentle poet who drew his first breath be- 
neath that hospitable roof, and whose first years were 
spent in the midst of these historic scenes. It is no 



Oliver Wendell Holmes. 9 

longer the " Hastings House," but the birth-place of 
Oliver Wendell Holmes. 

Nearly two generations ago, in the year 1807, the 
minister of the " First Church in Cambridge " moved 
into the old house — for it was old even then. He 
was the Rev. Abiel Holmes, well known as a labori- 
ous and faithful pastor, and a literary man of promi- 
nence wherever American history and biography were 
read. He was accompanied by his wife, a daughter 
of the Hon. Oliver Wendell an eminent citizen of the 
neighboring town of Boston. Cambridge was a mere 
village then, and the common a waste, unfenced 
stretch of sand and gravel crossed by a number of 
unshaded country roads. Around it there were 
ran^-ed a few straggling houses which, for the most 
part, were black with age, and guiltless of paint. The 
south windows of the house, which now became the 
parsonage, opened upon the red buildings of Harvard 
College, then few in number, and commanded the 
view over the Common to which Dr. Holmes refers in 
his "Metrical Essay," though but one church stood 
there until 1S33 : 

" Our ancient church ! its lowly tower, 

Beneath the loftier spire, 
Is shadowed when the sunset hour 
Clothes the tall shaft in fire. 



lo Poets'' Homes. 

Like Sentinel and Nun they keep 

Their vigil on the green ; 
One seems to guard, and one to weep, 

The dead that lie between." 

The "lowly tower " belongs still to Christ Church, the 
history of which runs back many years before revolu- 
tionary times, and in it General Washington wor- 
shipped in 1775. The old house and the scenes 
about it, as well as the history connected with them 
are evidently dear to Dr. Holmes, and we find 
them frequently alluded to in his verses, as well as in 
his prose. In the Atlantic for January, 1872, he de- 
votes several pages to a description of them, in 
which he says, " It was a great happiness to have 
been born in an old house haunted by such recol- 
lections, with harmless ghosts walking its corridors, 
with fields of waving grass and trees and singing birds, 
and that vast territory of four or five acres around it to 
give a child the sense that he was born to a noble 

principality It seems lo me 

I should hardly be quite happy if I could not recall 
at will the Old House with the Long Entry and the 
White Chamber (where I wrote the first verses that 
made me known, with a pencil, stans pcde in u>w* 

* Standing on one foot The verses were those entitled " Old Iron- 
sides." 



^■J-i7fy:rC 




Oliver Wendell Holmes. 



13 



pretty nearly) and the Little Parlor, and the study and 
the old books in uniforms as varied as those of the An- 
cient and Honorable Artillery Company used to be, if 
,my memory serves me right, and the front yard with 
the stars of Bethlehem growing, flowerless, among the 
grass, and the dear faces to be seen no more there or 
anywhere on this earthly place of farewells." Again 
he writes, " We Americans are all cuckoos — we 
make our homes in the nests of other birds. . . . 
We lose a great deal in living where there are so few 
permanent homes." 

But I was not talking of the son, nor of the old home 
but of the poet's father. He is depicted to us as one 
of the loveliest characters — full of learning, but never 
distressing others by showing how learned he was, " a 
gentleman, a scholar, and a Christian " who for forty 
years walked these classic streets and taught a loving 
and respecting people the lessons that he first learned 
himself. He drew children to him by his kindly man- 
ner, and when he appeared before them his cane 
never frightened them, for they knew that his pockets 
were filled with sweets for them, and his mouth with 
pleasant words. One of his last acts was to give a 
good book to each member of his Sunday-school as 
they passed before the pulpit where he stood. 

Of such a father and of such a mother, in the old 



14 



Pocts^ Homes. 



gambrel-roofed house, Oliver Wendell Holmes was 
born, on the twenty -ninth of August, 1809.* It 
seems to me that he fulfils the conditions of " the man 
of family," as he is described in the Atlantic 
MontJily for November, 1859, by the "Autocrat of 
the Breakfast-table." " The man who inherits family 
traditions and the cumulative humanities of at least 
four or five generations. Above all things, as a child, 
he should have tumbled about in a library." Every 
surrounding circumstance gave Dr. Holmes in his 
youth tendencies towards the culture, wisdom, ge- 
niality, and love of books, which he" has since ex- 
hibited. 

He went to school in Cambridge, was fitted for 
college at the Academy founded by Mr. Phillips 
in Andover, and took his bachelor's degree at Har- 
vard in 1829. It is not necessary, however, to make 
the last statement, for all the world knows that he 
belongs to the class of 1829, he has celebrated it so 

*I am very sure of this date, for I have seen the record of the important fact, 
that was made by the father at the time. It is on one of those little old " Al- 
manacks'' that were then so commonly used for such purposes. Under the 
date of August .29, 1S09, I found these words (or letters ) : " Son b." When 
old Dr. Holmes wrote them he threw a little sand upon the ink, and there it 
still glistens as the paper is turned to the sunlight ! The map of Europe has 
been made over since that day, nations have risen and fallen, the United 
States has passed through three wars, and yet the little grain of sand, the em- 
blem of things changeable and fleeting, glLi-tens unchanged upon the poet's 
birth-record I 



Oliver Wendell Holmes. 



15 



often in his poems. It niust have been a remarkable 
class to have so thoroughly inspired the Doctor's 
muse. He lil-ces to laugh at the regularity with which, 
since 185 1, he has produced poems for its meetings. 
A few years ago, he spoke of himself thus; 

" It's awful to think of — how, year after year, 

With his piece in his pocket he waits for you here ; 

No matter who's missing, there always is one 

To lug out his manuscript, sure as a gun. 

' Why won't he stop writing ? ' Humanity cries : 

The answer is, briefly, ' He can't if he tries ; 

He has played with his foolish old feather so long. 

That the gooscquill, in spite of him, cackles in song.' " 

After graduation Dr. Holmes studied law for a year 
at the, Dane Law School, of Harvard College. Dur- 
ing this time, he wrote many poems for the college 
periodical, called " The Collegian,'" among which 
were "The Height of the Ridiculous," "Evening — 
by a Tailor," and "The Last of the Dryads," the last 
having reference to a general and severe pruning of 
the trees around the college. At the year's end, how- 
evei, he left this study for that of medicine, which he 
followed tmtil the spring of 1833. He then went to 
Europe where he still pursued his medical studies, 
principally in Paris, until the autumn of 1835, when 
he returned. In 1836 he was in Cambridge, pre- 
pared to take his degree as Doctor of Medicine. It 



1 6 Pods' Homes. 

was in the summer of that year that he delivered, be- 
fore the Phi Beta Kappa society, the remarkable 
poem, entitled " Poetry : A Metrical Essay," begin- 



" Scenes of my youth ! awake its slumlicring fire ! 
Ye winds of Memory, sweep the silent lyre ! " 

In this poem, he illustrates* pastoral and martial 
poetry, by his lines on the Cambridge churchyard to 
which I have already referred, and those stirring ones 
entitled "Old Ironsides," which are in all collections. 
The government had prepared to break up the old 
frigate Constitution, and when Dr. Holmes read his 
verses, into which he put all possible vigor, he ex- 
cited his hearers as if with an electric shock. I wish 
that I might have heard him as he exclaimed with in- 
dignant and vehement sarcasm : 

" Ay, tear her tattered ensign down ! " 

These stirring verses had been published in the 
Boston Advertiser several years before ( I have told 
you how they were written ) , and from its columns had 
been copied by the newspapers all over the country. 
They had been circulated on hand-bills at Washing- 
ton, and had caused the preservation of the old vessel. 
This is one of the marked cases in which poetry has 



Oliver Wendell Holmes. \ 7 

shown its power to stir a people's heart, and to 
accomplish something that prose would have failed to 
do. 

In 1839, Dr. Holmes became Professor of Anatomy 
and Physiology at Dartmouth College, and ever since 
that time he has been lecturing to medical students 
upon subjects which you would think could not be 
made interesting; but Dr. Holmes always makes 
people attentive to what he says, and I have been 
told that there is no professor whom the students so 
much like to listen to. When you read his works you 
will find that he saj'S that every one of us is three per- 
sons, and I think that if the statement is true in re- 
gard to ordinary men and women Dr. Holmes him- 
self is, at least, half a dozen persons. He lectures 
so well on Anatomy that his students never suspect 
him to be a poet, and he writes verses so well that 
most people do not suspect him of being an authority 
among scientific men. I ought to tell you that, 
though he illustrates his medical lectures by quota- 
tions of the most appropriate and interesting sort 
from a wonderful variety of authors, he has never 
been known to refer to his own writings in that way. 
I will say here all that I wish to about his medical 
career. 

He did not stay long so far away from Cambridg-e 



i8 Poets' Homes. 

as Dartmouth is, and in 1840 we find him married 
and established as a popular physician in Boston. It 
was at this time that he began again to give instruc- 
tion to young physicians ; for he lias never been able 
to shut up his knowledge and keep it for his ywn use, 
and has always been a teacher as well as a learner, 
as most great and good men have been. 

He wrote about diseases and the causes of them, 
and upset some of the notions that doctors had al- 
ways thought ought to be respected. There is a bad 
fever with a long name, that certain leading author- 
ities thought could not be " taken " by touching a per- 
son who has it, but Dr. Holmes proved that it could 
be, and intelligent doctors agree with him now. In 
1837, he published a volume containing three Prize Es- 
say? on Intermittent Fever, Neuralgia, and the need of 
Direct Exploration in Medical Practice. Since then, 
he has written other very important essays of this 
kind, one of which is on Homoeopathy and Kindred 
Delusions. Besides this, he has argued against giv- 
ing people as much medicine as doctors used to give 
when he was taught to practice, and for this we all 
owe him a debt. 

I must not go on with this subject too long, for you 
wish to know about Dr. Holmes the poet, and not the 
physician. It is enough to say that he grew so fa- 



Oliver Wendell Holmes. 19 

mous and learned in this profession that when the 
celebrated Dr. Warren gave up his professorship at 
Harvard, Dr. Holmes was chosen to take his place as 
professor of Anatomy. That was in 1847, and he has 
been Professor Holmes ever since, and is now teach- 
ing the sons of some of those to whom, years ago, he 
gave their first lesson in Anatomy. Yet, if you look al 
his portrait, taken only a few weeks ago, you will 
say that he is not an old man himself ! 

Having arrived at the point where Dr. Holmes was 
married and established for life, I will say a little 
more about the homes he has had. They are three. 
Of the first one I have told you and have shown you 
a picture. When I was a small boy, a square old- 
fashioned mansion used to be pointed out to me as 
the residence of a poet, whom I knew as having writ- 
ten a poem that I thought '■ splendid," entitled "The 
Height of the Ridiculous." It began thu~. : 

'■ I wrote some lines, once on .1 time, 

In wondrous merry mood, 
And thought, as usual, men would say 

They were exceeding good. 
They were so queer, so very queer, 

I laughed as I would die ; 
Albeit, in a general way, 

A sober man am I." 

Do you not remember them? 



20 Poets' Homes. 

The house that I speak of stood upon an elevation 
overlooking a meadow bordering the Housatonic 
river in the town of Pittsfiekl. Dr. Holmes's great- 
grandfather, Jacob Wendell, had had a little farm 
there of twenty-four thousand acres, and this house 
was surrounded by what remained of them unsold. 
( Let me see : How many acres make a square mile ? ) 
I have told you how much Dr. Holmes is attached 
to the homes that he has had. This was no excep- 
tion. He lived here a part of the year only, from 
1849 to 1856. * In a poem recited at Pittsfield in 
those days he says : 

" Poor drudge of the city ! how happy he feels, 

With the burrs on his legs and the grass at his heels ! 

In yonder green meadow, to memory dear, 

He slaps a mosquito, and brushes a tear ; 

The dew-drops hang round him on blossoms and shoots, 

He heaves but one sigh for his youth and his boots. 

There stands the old school-house, hard by the old church, 

The tree at its side had the flavor of birch ; 

O, sweet were the days of his juvenile tricks ; 

Though the prairie of youth had so many " big licks." 

By the side of yon river he weeps and he slumps ; 

His boots fill with water as if they were pumps, 

Till, sated with rapture, he steals to his bed, 

With a glow in his heart and a cold in his head." 

* In the tenth paper of the "Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table," Dr. Holmes 
refers to this place thus : — " In that home where seven blessed summers 
were passed, which stand in memory like the seven golden candlesticks in 
the beautiful vision of the holy dreamer." 



Oliver Wendell Holmes. 2 1. 

My readers out West will know what a " lick " is, 
and all of them will see that Dr. Holmes writes of 
the tree by the old school-house as feelingly as he 
could have done if his young ideas had been taught 
to shoot in Pittsfield instead of Cambridge. 

The third home is the elegant one on Beacon Street 
in Boston, of the library of which I give you as good 
a picture as a photographer could make. It is a 
charming room, with a generous bay-window looking 
over the broad river Charles, and commanding an 
extensive view of Cambridge. Even in the picture 
you can recognize the lofty tower of Memorial Hall, 
which is but a few steps from the good Doctor's first 
home. The ancient Hebrew always had a window 
open towards Jerusalem, the city about which his 
most cherished hopes and memories clustered, and 
this window gives its owner the pleasure of looking 
straight to the place of his birth, and thus of fresh- 
ening all the happy memories of a successful life. 

I cannot show you two other windows that you 
would see if you could enter this library. They are 
circular, and shed the light of day upon the alcoves 
between the book-cases, and also upon the apparatus 
connected with a microscope which stands ready for 
use near one of them. 

[ wish you could all stand with me beside the 



22 Poets' Homes. 

writing-table in the center of this room. You would 
see your face reflected in a large mirror over the 
cheerful open fire that burns on the hearth, and you 
would notice that the walls on all sides, except one 
through which you entered, are lined with books. 
Beside the broad doors you would see two portraits 
that would attract your attention and keep it. The 
one, of a lady ( whicli once had a rent in the canvas ), 
represents "Dorothy Q.," — 

" Grandmother's mother, — her age, I guess, 

Thirteen summers, or something less ; 

Girlish bust, but womanly air, 

Smooth, square forehead, and up-rnlled hair. 

Lips that lover has never kissed, 

Taper fingers and slender wrist, 

Hanging sleeves of stiff brocade, — 

So they painted the little maid. 

On her hand a parrot green 

Sits unmoving, and broods serene." 

This little maiden was a daughter of Judge Edmund 
Quincy of Boston, and married Edward Jackson. 
She was an aunt of a second Dorothy Quinc}', after- 
ward Mrs. John Hancock, whose husband signed the 
Declaration of Independence in such a dashing way. 
The other portrait is a speaking one, by Copley, of the 
Rev. Dr. Samuel Cooper, a celebrated divine of Revo- 
lutionary times, who was a friend of Benjamin Frank- 



Oliver Wendell Hohnes. ■ 23 

lin, and preached in the Brattle Street Church to Dr. 
Holmes' ancestors. This home is very elegant, and 
Dr. Holmes evidently enjoys it very much. Should 
you not like to see him writing at that table ? I can 
imagine him engaged in that way. I suppose that 
he has just come in from a lecture where he has been 
delighting the medical students with his lucid exposi- 
tion of some anatomical subject. He warms his feet 
before the fire awhile, and then remembers that some 
editor has been urging him for a poem. His eyes 
glance out at the window, he sees the Memorial Tower ; 
he remembers the old parsonage below it, his mind 
travels over time as his eye has over space, and he 
peoples the house and the neighborhood with the 
men, women and children of many long years ago. 
He hears the notes of a musical instrument, that came 
out of the windows looking towards the church of 
those days, and his imagination is fixed in words, 
thus: 

" In the little southern parlor of the house you may have seen, 
With the gambrel roof, and the gable looking westward to 
the green, 
At the side towards the sunset, with the window on its right, 
Stood the London-made piano I am dreaming of to-night 1 
Ah, me ! how I rememljer the evening when it came ! 
What a cry of eager voices, what a group of cheeks in flame I 
When the wondrous box was opened that had come from 
over seas, 



24 Poets'' Homes. 

With its smell of mastic varnish and its flash of ivory keys. • 
Then the children all grew fretful in the restlessness of joy, 
For the boy would push his sister, and the sister crowd the boy, 
Till the father asked for quiet in his grave, paternal way, 
But the mother hushed the tumult with the words, " Now, Mary, 
play." 

Does this not show that our poet has never for^-ot- 
ten that home, nor the great excitement caused in 
the family circle by the arrival of the imported dem- 
enti piano, which was such a wonder in those days ? 
Is there not something delightfully cordial in the 
introduction that this gives us to the family circle — to 
father and mother, brother and sisters, and even to his 
little " Catherine," who ran in to listen to the won- 
drous music, as you will learn if you read the other 
verses of the " Opening of the Piano " ? 

Suppose, however, that Dr. Holmes, instead of 
looking so far for his subject, had cast his eyes down 
upon the Charles. Then he might have written thus 
as he did last winter : 

" Through my north window, in the wintry weather, — 

My airy oriel on the river shore, — 
I watch the seafowl as they flock together, 

Where late the boatman flashed his dripping oar. 
How often, gazing where a bird reposes. 

Rocked on the wavelets, drifcing with the tide, 
I lose myself in strange metempsychosis. 

And float, a sea fowl, at a sea fowl's side. 



Oliver Wendell Holmes. 25 

A voice recalls me. — From my window turning, 

I find myself a pUimeless biped still; 
No beak, no claws, no sign of wings discerning, — 

In fact, with nothing birdlike but my quill." 



This poem was in the Atlantic for January last. 
It contains a touch that is very characteristic of 
one so liindly in his feelings as Dr. Holmes. As he calls 
our attention to the fowl he loves to see on the water, 
he takes advantage of a moment when one of the 
ducks is diving, to tell us that it is not valuable to the 
hunter — a remark which of course he could not make 
in the fowl's presence ! 

By knowing so much as we have now learned of 
the homes of Dr. Holmes, we get an introduction to 
his mind and heart, and understand something of 
how his poems have grown out of his life and have 
been moulded by his surroundings. It is not neces- 
sary for us to wander into the other apartments of his 
present house, though he will gladly show us his 
drawing-room, just across the hall from the library, 
and let us feast our eyes upon some of the works of 
art there. He will call our attention especially to 
some remarkable reproductions of paintings of the old 
masters, made by a new process'. Here I will say, 
by way of parenthesis, that we owe to the ingenuity of 
our poet the stereoscope in its present available shape, 



'26 Poets' Homes. 

which he gave to the public without burdening it with 
the additional cost which it would have had if it had 
been patented. It is one of the few inventions of 
value that are not patented. 

Thus far we have studied Dr. Holmes as a success- 
ful professional student, writer and poet. Twenty- 
five years ago he appeared in a new character. He 
began to lecture on contemporary poets, and showed 
that he was a most acute literary critic. He knew 
human nature and was able to manage audiences of a 
mixed kind as well as those composed of students. 
Twenty years ago last autumn a new magazine was 
started in Boston. It was to be of the very highest 
literary character, and the poet James Russell Lowell, 
now our minister at Madrid, was called to its edito- 
rial chair. He said that he would not accept unless 
his friend Oliver Wendell Holmes would agree to be 
one of the contributors. Dr. Holmes was reluctant to 
promise. He remembered that he had been writing 
for thirty years, and felt that a new generation of read- 
ers as well as writers had grown up, and thought that 
he ought to be allowed to rest. Now, as he looks 
back, he sees that he was mistaken, and believes that 
the new magazine came for his fruit just as it was ripe 
for the gathering. " It seems very strange to me," 
he says with his quaint frankness, " as I look back and 




DR. HOLMES LIBRARV — BEACON STREET. 



Oliver Wendell Holmes. 29 

see how everything was arranged for me, as if I had 
been waited for as patiently as Kepler said he was \ 
but so the least sometimes seem to be cared for as 
anxiously as the greatest — are not two sparrows sold 
for a farthing, and one of them shall not fall ? If I 
had been the sparrow that fell in the early part of 
1853, the world might have lost very little, but I 
should have carried a few chirps with me that I had 
rather have left behind me." 

Such was Dr. Holmes's modest opinion of himself 
in 1857, Mr. Lowell thought otherwise, and so did 
the public. The magazine wanted a name, and Dr. 
Holmes called it " The Atlantic Monthly Magazine." 
As he sat down to write for the first number, he re- 
membered that, jus.t twenty-five years before, he had 
published two articles entitled " The Autocrat of the 
Breakfast-Table," and he says that the recollections 
of these crude products of his uncombed literary boy- 
hood suggested the thought that it would be a curious 
experiment to shake the same bough again and see if 
the ripe fruit were better or worse than the early 
wind-falls. So he began his first article thus : " I 
was just going to say, when I was interrupted, — " 
and did not explain for a year how long the interrup- 
tion had lasted. 

His papers took the reading public by storm and 



3o Poets' Homes. 

successfully established the Atlantic. It was acknowl- 
edged that Dr. Holmes was the best living magazine 
writer. For a year he sat at the breakfast-table as 
the Autocrat, and then he began a series of papers 
entitled, " The Professor at the Breakfast-Table." 
These were followed by " The Professor's Story," 
afterwards published as " Elsie Venner ; a Romance 
of Destiny." In 1867, " The Guardian Angel " was 
the great attraction of the magazine, and in 1872, the 
" Autocrat " series was closed with a number of arti- 
cles entitled, "The Poet at the Breakfast-Table." 
These ended with a poetical epilogue, in which the 
author represents a buyer in 1972 pui'chasing the 
whole of them at a book-store for " one dime ! " 

This series of prose works is overflowing with wit 
and wisdom, and established the reputation of Dr. 
Holmes as a writer of prose, as high as it had before 
stood as a poet. It constituted, however, but a pa^'t 
of his productions for the period. He wrote con- 
stantly upon topics that were uppermost in the peo- 
ple's thoughts ; and especially was he in demand 
whenever on an occasion of extraordinary importance 
a poem was required. He became the poet-laureate 
of Boston, and wrote, himself, — 

" Here's the cousin of a king, — 
Would I do the civil thing ? 




^^^^1%^\ / 



OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES. 



Oliver Wendell Hohjies 33 

Here's the first-born of a queen ; 
Here's a slant-eyed Mandarin. 
Would I polish off Japan ? 
Would I greet this famous man, 
Prince or Prelate, Sheik or Shah ? — 
Figaro (;i and Figaro la, ! 
Would I just this once comply ? — 
So they teased and teased till I 
* ( Be the truth at once confessed) 

"Wavered, — yielded, — did my best." 

Thus he has gratified his friends and the pub He from 
time to time, ever since the first of February, 1845, 
-when he wrote a song for the dinner given to Charles 
Dickens by tlie young men of Boston, at which time, 
weaving together the memory of the greatest drama- 
tist and the rising story-teller, he spoke of the "dewy 
blossoms " that wave in the " glorious island of the 
sea," 

"Alike o'er Juliet's storied tomb 
And Nelly's nameless grave." 

Here, I must leave my subject incomplete, for I am 
not a prophet, and a prophet only can tell what new 
laurels Dr. Holmes will yet win. But if he should 
leave us now, he wpuld always be remembered as one 
who, in many ways, had distinguished himself above 
his fellows. As a professional man, he has been 
thorough and successful ; as a man of letters, versa- 



24 Poets' Homes. 

tile, brilliant, of the highest culture • as a citizen, pa- 
triotic ; as a man, an exemplification of elegance of 
manner and kindliness of heart. May he live many 
years, and teach others by his example to practice 
his virtues ! 

Though / am not a prophet, there was one living 
in England just three hundred years ago, who, it al- 
most seems to me, had Dr. Holmes in mind when 
he wrote the following lines, with which I will close : 

" A merrier man. 
Within the limit of becoming mirth, 
I never spent an hour's talk withal • 
His eye begets occasion for his wit ; 
For every object that the one doth catch, 
The other turns to a mirth-moving jest ; 
Which his fair tongue, ( conceit's expositor ) 
X Delivers in such apt and gracious words 
That aged ears play truant at his tales, 
And younger hearings are quite ravished, 
So sweet and voluble is his discourse. 

" May he live ' 
Longer than I have time to tell his years. 
Ever beloved and loving may his rule be I 
And when old Time shall lead him to his end, 
Goodness and he fill up one monument I ' 



WALT WHITMAN. 

DURING the summer heats of the Centennial 
year, a little child less than a year old fell ill 
and died in its house, in Camden, New Jersey. The 
funeral was different from most funerals — no ser- 
mons, no singing, no ceremony. In the middle of 
the room the dead lay in a white coffin made fragrant 
with a profusion of fresh geranium leaves and tube 
roses. For over an hour, the little children from the 
neighborhood kept coming in silently, until the room 
was nearly filled. Some were not tall enough to see 
the face of the dead baby, and had to be lifted up to 
look. Near the head of the coffin, in a large chair, 
sat an old man, with snow-white hair and beard. 
The children pressed about him, one at each side of 
•him encircled in his arms, while a beautiful little girl 

35 



36 Poets' Homes. 

was seated in his lap. After gazing wonderingly and 
intently at the scene about her, she looked up in 
the paternal face bending over her, as if to ask the 
meaning of Death. The old man understood the 
child's thought, and said : 

" You don't know what it is, do you, my dear "i " 
then added, ''^neither do we^ 

The dead baby was the nephew and namesake of 
the poet, Walt Whitman, the old man who sat in the 
great chair with little children gathered about him. 
So his being a special lover of children, understand- 
ing, and sympathizing with them, perhaps, as only a 
poet may, and nursing, cheering and helping them 
when sick, as perhaps poets rarely do, or can, must 
add a peculiar fitness and charm to a sketch of him, 
especially for young readers. 

To go back to the beginning of his life, will take us 
into a farm house at West Hills, Long Island, about 
thirty miles from New York city, where the poet was 
born. May 2)^^ 1819. His father was of English 
descent, his ancestors being among the hrst English 
emigrants that settled on Long Island four or five 
generations ago. The Whitmans were farmers, both 
the men and women laboring with their own hands. 
A famous friend of the poet, thus describes his pater- 
nal home : 



Walt Whitmtvi, 



37 



"The Whitmans Hved in a long stor}'-and-a-half 
house, hugely timbered, which is still standing. A 
great smoke-canopied kitchen, with vast hearth and 
chimney, formed one end of the house. The existence 
of slavery in New York at that time, and the posses- 
sion by the family of some twelve or fifteen slaves, 
house and field servants, gave things quite a patri- 
archal look. The ver}- young darkies could be seen, 
a swarm of them, toward sundown, in this kitchen, 
squatted in a circle on the floor, eating their supper 
of pudding and milk. In the house, and in food and 
furniture, all was rude, but substantial. No carpets 
nor stoves were known, and no coffee, and tea or 
sugar only for the women. Rousing woodfires gave 
both warmth and light on winter nights. Pork, poul- 
tr}', beef, and all the ordinar}' grains and vegetables 
were plentiful. Cider was the men's common drink 
and used at meals. The clothes were mainly home- 
spun. Journeys were made by both men and women 
on horseback. Books were scarce. The annual 
copy of the Almanac was a treat, and was pored over 
through the long winter evenings." 

It was in this home the poet's father, Walter Whit- 
man, was born. He was a large, quiet, serious man, 
very kind to children and animals. He was a good 
citizen, parent and neighbor. The poet's mother, 



38 Poefs Homes. 

Lousia Van Velsor, was of Dutch descent, her ances- 
tors, a race of sea folks and mariners, being genuine 
Hollanders. The Van Velsors were all passionatel}' 
fond of horses, and Louisa, when a girl, was a daring 
and spirited rider. As a woman, she was healthy and 
strong, possessed of a kind and generous heart, and 
good sense ; she was cheerful and equable in temper, 
qualities which the rearing of her large family of boys 
and girls tested and developed to an unusual degree. 
Her son, the subject of this sketch, who was her 
second child, always speaks of her as the " dear, dear, 
mother." At the time of her death in 1873, and that 
of his sister Martha, which occurred at about the 
same time, he says : 

" They were the two best and sweetest women I 
have ever seen or known, or ever expect to see." 

It was fortunate that in his earlier life he was 
under the influence of such women, for they became 
to him the type and model of all womanhood. " It i? 
the character of the mother,'" I have heard of him 
say, "that stamps that of the child." 

But the boy's life on the farm, from the high places 
of which he could see the ocean, and hear the roar of 
the surf in storms, was of short duration. While he 
was still in frocks, his parents moved to Brooklyn, 
which was then far from being the great city it now 



JVa/^ W/iitman. 39 

is. Here his father engaged in house-building, while 
the young Walt went to public school, going every 
summer to visit the old home at West Hills. Of the 
events of his childhood, the poet recalls one of pleas- 
ant interest. General Lafayette was then on a visit 
to this country in 1825, and went to Brooklyn, 
riding thi'ough the town in state, with the people 
lining the street, cheering, and waving hats and hand- 
kerchiefs. Even the children of the public schools 
were given a holiday in which to add to his welcome. 
As the general rode along, he was induced to stop on 
his way, and lay the corner stone for a building that 
was to contain a free public library for young people. 
There the children came thronging, while some of 
she gentlemen present were kind enough to lift the 
smaller ones to safe and convenient places for seeing 
the ceremony. Among these helpers of the little 
ones, was Lafayette, who took up the five-year-old 
Walt Whitman, kissed and embraced the child and 
then set him down in a good and safe place. 

When the boy had reached the age of thirteen, he 
went to work in a printing office, learning to set type. 
For three years following, he continued to set type, to 
read and study, and then, when scarcely seventeen 
years old, he began to teach school on the Island, in 
the counties of Queens and Suffolk, and " boarded 



40 Poets'' Homes. 

round." During this time he made his first essay as 
a writer, sending a slcetch, or story, to the then 
famous monthly, the "Democratic Review." His 
article was commended, printed, copied and quoted, 
— a success brilliant enough to quite turn the head 
of a youthful aspirant. Other contributions followed, 
with an occasional ''shy" at poetry, until he finally 
left off "boarding round" and went to New York, 
beginning work there as a printer and writer. His 
talent for writing was clever, and for a time he wrote 
reports, editorials, paragraphs, and the like. Occa- 
sionally he attended political meetings, and made 
speeches. How good an orator he was, 1 am unable 
to say. To be brief, during the period from 1837 to 
1848, he seemed to have led a nappy, careless, Bohe- 
niianish sort of life, making the acquaintance of hu- 
man existence under a multitude of phases, and 
becoming especially familiar with the life of the 
lower classes of people, whose society pleased him 
better than did that of the rich and the learned. All 
this broadened and deepened his sympathies, and 
was a part of that "long foreground" in his career 
which preceded his fame as a poet. 

When about thirty years of age, to use his own 
words, he " went off on a leisurely journey and work- 
ing expedition, (my brother Jeff with me) through 



IValf Whitman. 41 

all the Middle States and down the Ohio and Missis- 
sippi rivers. Lived a while in New Orleans and 
worked there. After a time plodded back northward, 
up the Mississippi, the ^Missouri, etc., and around to, 
and by v/ay of, the great lakes, Michigan, Huron and 
Erie, to Niagara Falls and Lower Canada, — finally 
returning through Central New York and down the 
Hudson." In 1851 he began the publication of a 
daily and weekly newspaper in Erooklyn ; then sold 
that out, and occupied himself in house building, 
which it will be remembered was his father's voca- 
tion. He continued in this business until 1855, when 
his father died, a loss he keenly felt, for his love of 
kindred is strongly and deeply rooted. About this 
time he began, after a great deal of writing and rewritr 
ing, to put his poems, which then consisted of one 
foundation piece, so to speak, and which he oddly 
enough named for himself, and ten or a dozen shorter 
pieces, to pi ess. He says of this work, that he had 
great trouble in leaving out the stock "poetical" 
touches, but finally did. He was at this time at the 
meridian of life, thirty-five years old. 

These poems, when printed and bound, formed a 
thin quarto volume which was labeled, in large let- 
ters, " Leaves of Grass." In the frontispiece was a 
neatly engraved half length portrait of a youngish 



42 Poets' Homes. 

man, wearing a broad-brimmed hat, rather jauntily 
adjusted, a plain shirt with wide collar left open at 
the throat, one arm akimbo, and the hand of the 
other stuffed in his pantaloon pocket. The face 
under the broad-brimmed hat, was, however, a study, 
and one difBcult to describe. The mouth seemed to 
say one thing and the eyes another. This was a por- 
trait of the author at thirty-five years of age, and it 
may interest possessors of copies to know that this 
•• shirt-sleeve picture " was daguerreotyped from life 
one hot day in August, by Gabriel Harrison of Brook- 
lyn, afterwards drawn on steel by McRae, and \\as a 
very faithful and characteristic likeness at the time. 
The large head that follows, and which looks like 
a study from the old masters, so grand and powerful 
it is, was photographed from life in Washington, in 
1872, by Geo. C. Potter and drawn on wood by Lin- 
ton. A distance of but seventeen years separates the 
two portraits. One might readily think that half a 
century had elapsed. But the war lay between, and 
that was long — long, not to be measured by years. 

To come back to "Leaves of Grass," it was issued 
without the author's name, the printing was poorly 
done, the publisher was unknown to fame, the style 
of the poems was different from anything hitherto 
known under the sun, and altogether the prospect of 







WALT WHITMAN AT THIRTY-FIVE. 



Wa/^ Whitmaii. 



45 



the " Leaves " was a withering one. A few copies 
were d eposited in New York and Brooklyn for sale 
but weeks elapsed and none were sold. JBut very 
little notice was taken of the book by reviewers, who 
either thought it beneath their notice, or found it too 
far beyond their comprehension to attempt a criticism 
of it, or felt unwilling to hazard a critic's reputation by 
actually classifying it as literary " fish, flesh or fowl." 

Suddenly, however, from an unexpected quarter 
came a powerful voice to its rescue. Ralph Waldo 
Emerson spoke, and his words were a "magnificent 
eulogium " of " Leaves of Grass." Not even this, 
however, effected a sale for that first edition. A sec- 
ond, somewhat enlarged, issued in New York, shared 
the same fate. A third, printed in Boston, in i860, 
in a very elegant manner, and still further enlarged, 
had somewhat better luck. In the financial crash 
that preceded and followed the outbreak of war, the 
publishers failed — a few hundred copies of the book 
had been sold — everything then was forgotten but 
the weal and woe of the country, and the poet went 
off (iS6i-'65 ) to the war. 

The life of Walt Whitman, during those dreadful 
years which ensued, and which he spent in unpaid 
service in hospital and camp among the dead, dy- 
ing, wounded and sick, no one can truly depict. The 



46 Poets'' Homes. 

poet himself, in his "Memoranda of the War' written 
on the spot, has best done it, in a style, which for 
simpHcity and forgetfulness of self, is yet the most 
thrilHng and powerfully descriptive record of those 
sad events, that has as yet appeared, or is likely to 
appear. He seems to have been all things to all 
men — as need demanded. Of powerful physique, 
magnetic, sympathetic, human to his heart's core, he 
goes among the wounded dispensing food, cordials, 
writing letters for them, reading to them, praying with 
them if they wish it, speaking words of cheer, infus- 
ing new life in their veins from his own abundance of 
life, bearing always about him a breeziness of health, 
freshness, and energy, holding an emaciated hand 
for hours, may be in silence, kissing a poor dying boy 
for his mother's sake, penning a love letter for an- 
other who will be " gone hence " long before the 
sadly precious words reach their destination. 

He supports himself for two or three years as cor- 
respondent for northern journals, and in addition to 
the little he is enabled to expend from his own 
income, he is the trusted almoner of bountiful hands 
— wealthy women in Salem, Boston and New York. 

In 1864, after three years of assiduous labor, and 
latterly of most exhausting watching and waiting 
upon soldiers whose wounds from the extreme heat 




.**%^_ 



Wa/i Whitman. 49 

and previous neglect have become terrible,his health, 
which until then had been a marvel of superb robust- 
ness, gave way and he was prostrated by the first 
sickness of his life — was ordered north — and lay 
ill for six months. 

Upon his partial recovery (for he has never re- 
covered), he returned to Washington, and was given 
a position in the Department of the Interior. A 
goodly portion of his salary and his leisure hours 
were devoted to hospital work, and as " prophet, 
poet, or priest," the tenderest, heartfulest tribute 
that can be paid to Walt Whitman must come from 
the suffering soldier boys he nursed back to life, 
boys who are men to-day, and whose eyes brighten 
and moisten at his name, and from the silence of 
those who died in his arms, and whose requiem he 
has so touchingly chanted. 

Here are some lines from his " Drum Taps " in 
which the great Mother of All is represented as 
stalking in desperation over the earth, mournfully 
crying : 

"Absorb them well, O my earth, she cried — I charge you 

lose not my sons ! lose not an atom ; 
And you streams, absorb them well, taking their dear blood; 
And you local spots, and you airs that swim above lightly, 
And all you essences of soil r.nd growth — and you my rivers' 

depths ; 



50 Poefs Homes. 

And you mountain sides — and the woods where my dear chil- 
dren's blood trickled, reddened ; 

And you trees, down to your roots, to bequeath to all future 
trees, 

My dead absorb — my young men's beautiful bodies absorb — 
and their precious, precious, precious blood ; 

Which holding in trust for me, faithfully back again give me 
many a year hence ; 

In blowing airs from the fields, back again give me my dar- 
lings — give my immortal heroes ; 

Exhale me them centuries hence — breathe me their breath — let 
not an atom be lost, 

O years and graves ! O air and soil ! O my dead are aroma 
sweet I 

Exhale them, perennial, sweet death, years, centuries hence." 

As a clerk, Walt Whitman did his work well, poet 
though he was, mechanical as his work was, and 
modest as was his pay. We never hear him com- 
plaining of the " thankless government." A preju- 
diced official removes him at one time, because he is 
the author of that " strange book " ■ — " Leaves of 
Grass." Another official, of broader mental calibre, 
re-instates him in the Attorney General's office, 
because perliaps, that he is author of " Leaves of 
Grass," and a faithful, trustworthy clerk. This posi- 
tion he holds until 1873, when the remnant of strength 
and health that escaped destruction during the war, 
yields to nervous paralysis, and helpless and gray, 
hair and beard by many years prematurely whitened 
he quits work and goes to Camden, N. J., to live. 



JVa/f Whitman. 



SI 



These later years of illness have undoubtedly been 
the hardest years in the life of the poet. Helpless 
and half sick, his ills have been aggravated by pecu- 
liarly trying circumstances. Repeated atten:ipts to 
secure a small income by writing for the magazines 
have met with no success. Magazines as well as 
publishing houses, great and small, have been as so 
many closed avenues to him, and several of his agents 
one after another taking advantage of his helpless- 
ness, have put the proceeds of the sale of his books 
in their own pockets. But under all this, no word cf 
complaint, no tone or look of discouragement, for our 
poet is withal a philosopher. Always cheerful and 
serene he stands fast and strong, like a great rock 
lashed about by ocean billows ; or like some propheL 
with gifted- sight who sees a-down the vistas of time 
a shining verdict — one which all men read and see 
to be true. 

Latterly, however, Mr. Whitman has been getting 
better, and is more resolute and persevering than 
ever. Many a gleam of sunshine comes to him from 
friends at home and abroad, especially from England 
where he is greatly appreciated, and if appreciation 
be measured by its quality rather than by its quantity^ 
no poet of the century is more read than he. 

During the past twelve months he has prepared 



52 Poets' Homes. 

with his own liancis an edition of his works, in two 
volumes, which he himself sells. One is entitled 
" Leaves of Grass," and the other " Two Rivulets." 
Both volumes contain his photograph, put in with his 
own hands, his signature, and are in a way charged 
with his own personal magnetism — "authors' edi- 
tions," indeed. The price for these volumes is nec- 
essarily high, as the edition is very small, not over one 
hundred and fifty copies. I think he must make a poor 
agent for himself, for once when a party proposed to 
purchase, he quite earnestly advised them not to buy ! 
As to Walt Whitman's " home " it must be con- 
fessed that he has none and for many years has had 
none in the special sense of "home;" neither has he 
the usual library or " den " for composition and work. 
He composes everywhere — much in the open air, 
formerly while writing "Leaves of Grass," sometimes 
in the New York and Brooklyn ferries, sometimes on 
the top of omnibuses in the roar of Broadway, or 
amid the most crowded haunts of the city, or the 
shipping by day — and then at night, often in the 
Democratic Amphitheater of the Fourteenth Street 
opera house. The pieces in his "Drum Taps" were 
all prepared in camp, in the midst of war scenes, on 
picket or the march, in the army. 

He now spends the summer mostly ac a pleasant 



IVaU WJiitma)!. 5 3 

farm "down in Jersey," where he hkesbestto "loaf" 
by a secluded, picturesque pond on Timber Creek. 
It is in such places, and in the country at large, in 
the West on the prairies, by the Pacific, in cities too 
— New York, Washington, New Orleans, along Long 
Island shore where he well loves to linger, that Walt 
Whitman has really had his home and place of com- 
position. He is now 58 years old, and has his " head 
quarters," as he calls it, at Camden, where a brother 
resides. It is understood that he is leisurely en- 
gaged in still further digesting, completing, and 
adding to his volumes. 

In person Mr. Whitman is tall, erect and stout, 
and moves about with the aid of a large cane. His 
white hair, thrown straight back from his brow, and 
full white beard, give him a striking and patriarchal 
appearance. His cheeks are fresh and ruddy ; his 
forehead is deeply furrowed with horizontal lines : in 
conversation his blue gray eyes seem prone to hide 
themselves under the falling e3^elids, which are pres- 
ently suddenly lifted as if by a thought. His voice is 
clear and firm, his manner free from all affectation or 
eccentricity, and is eminently natural and social. He 
is not specially gifted, or fluent in conversation — is 
fond of society, and confesses that as he grows older, 
his love for humanity has come to be almost a hun- 



54 Poets' Homes. 

ger for the presence of human beings. He is a great 
favorite with children, and bachelor as he has been 
all his life, his nature is as sweet and gentle, his heart 
is sympathetic and young, as tender and true as if 
he were the happiest grandsire around whose knees 
sunny-haired children ever clung. 

In his dress he is very simple, but scrupulously 
neat and clean. His most intimate friends are plenty 
of cold water and pure air. He always wears his 
shirts open at the throat — a heathful, but uncommon 
habit. 

Among his "household gods" are two prized por- 
traits ; one is of himself, painted some years ago by 
Charles Hine of New York, who, on his death bed 
gave it to the poet. The other is a photographic por- 
trait of Alfred Tennyson, sent by the " Laureate " to 
Whitman. In a letter accompanying the picture, Mr. 
Tennyson says that his wife pronounces it the best 
likeness ever made of him — certainly it is a very 
handsome one, and few copies were made from the 
plate, as it was, unfortunately, soon after broken. 

Of the other Whitman children, none have devel- 
oped a poetic talent. According to a good humored 
remark of himself, " they think writing poetry is the 
sheerest nonsense." Two of his brothers are engi- 
neers. One of them. Col. George W. Whitman, was 



Wali Whitman. 55 

a gallant army officer during the whole war. 

The portraits given with this sketch are character- 
istic. The third one, with the broad-brimmed hat, he 
calls his "Quaker picture." His maternal grand- 
mother was a Quakeress, 

The autograph accompanying portrait number three, 
gives a fair idea of the strong, legible script that comes 
from his pen. He writes with frequent erasures, show- 
ing a delicacy and keen sense of fitness in the choice 
of words that are not readily responded to, owing un- 
doubtedly to a lack of suitable discipline in his early 
education. 

As to his poetry, there are almost as many opinions 
as there are readers of it. The best judgment one 
can have of it, is to read it for himself, study it, for 
there is far more in it, at all times, than may at first 
appear. For readers with rural tastes here are 
some lines descriptive of a scene in northern New 
York : 

THE OX TAMER. 
In a far away northern country, in the placid, pastoral region, 
Lives my farmer friend, the theme of my recitative, a famous 

Tamer of Oxen : 
There they bring him the three-year-olds and the four-year-olds, 

to break them ; 
He will take the wildest steer in the world, and break him and 

tame him ; 



56 Foets' Homes. 

He will go, fearless, without any whip, where the young bullock 

chafes up and down the yard ; 
The bullock's head tosses restless high in the air, with raging eyes; 
Yet, see you 1 how soon his rage subsides — how soon this Tamer 

tames him : 
Sec you 1 on the farms hereabout, a hundred oxen, young and 

old — and he is the man who has tamed them; 
They all know him — all are affectionate to him; 
See you 1 some are such beautiful animals — so lofty looking. 
Some are buff color'd — some mottled — one has a white line 

running along his back— some are brindled, 
Some have wide flaring horns (a good sign) — See you! the 

bright hides : 
See, the two with stars on their foreheads — See, the round 

bodies and broad backs ; 
See, how straight and square they stand on their legs — See, 

what fine, sagacious eyes ; 
See, how they watch their Tamer — they wish him near them — 

how they turn to look after him ! 
What yearning expression ! how uneasy they are when he moves 

away from them : 
— Now I marvel what it can be he appears to them, (books, pol- 
itics, poems, depart — all else departs ; ) 
I confess I envy only his fascination — my silent, illiterate 

friend, 
Whom a hundred oxen love, there in his life on farms, 
In the northern country far, in the placid, pastoral region. 

In conclusion, I select his poem on "Lincoln — 
dcad,^^ every line of which sounds like a knell. I 
am sure no sadder thrills were ever penned by poet, 
every verse seems to have been drawn through the 
poet's own bleeding heart: 




WAI.r WHITMAN A I FI KT V-TI I IvIiK. 



■ IVaU Whitman. 59 

« O Captain ! my Captain ! our fearful trip is done ; 
Tlie sliip has weather'd every rack, tlie prize we souglit is won 
The port is near, the bells I hear, the people all exulting. 
While follow eyes the steady keel, the vessel grim and daring ! 
But O heart ! heart ! heart ! 
. O the bleeding drops of red, 

Where on the deck my Captain lies. 
Fallen cold and dead. 

O Captain ! my Captain ! rise up and hear the bells ; 

Rise up -for you the flag is flung -for you the bugle trills ; 

For you bouquets and ribbon'd wreaths -for you the shores 

a-crowding ; 
For you they call, the swaying mass, their eager faces turning; 
Here Captain ! dear father 1 
This arm beneath your head ; 

It is some dream that on the deck 
You've fallen cold and dead. 

My Captain does not answer, his lips are pale and still ; 

My father does not feel my arm, he has no pulse nor will, 

The ship is anchor'd safe and sound, its voyage closed and 

done ; 
From fearful trip, the victor ship, comes in with object won; 
Exult, O shores, and ring, O bells ! 
But I, with mournful tread, 

Walk the deck my Captain lies. 
Fallen cold and dead. 



JOAQUIN MILLER. 

" \ POET without a Home " would not be an 
-Z A- inappropriate title for the present article. 
The other bards mentioned in this series have all 
domiciled themselves in comfortable quarters, ranging 
from aristocratic old mansions like Elmwood, or the 
Craigie House, to such snug suites of rooms as all but 
very rich New Yorkers must content themselves with. 
But Joaquin Miller comes pretty near being, like 
Goldsmith, a citizen of the world. The other clay he 
was praising the gentle temper and kindly modesty of 
Mr. Longfellow, and suddenly said : 

" What a home he has ! How I envy him, I who 
60 



Joaquin Miller. 6i 

have no home ! How I long for a home, some place 
I can call my own ! " 

The poet seldom speaks thus, contenting himself, 
as a rule, with the wild freedom which makes him 
happy under Shasta to-day and beside the Nile to- 
morrow. Once, however, as he sat in a room in a 
New York hotel, whose luxuries were his only for the 
night, he pointed to a box of quills -real, old-fash- 
ioned goose-feathers — and said : 

" There ! that's all I have in the world, and all I 

want." 

Omnia 7nea mccuvi porta, he might have said were 
he not, like Shakespeare, the master of small Latin ; 
for he can carry all his goods in his pocket, save, per- 
haps his pet saddle, which he would willingly trans- 
port down Broadway on his back. 

The average reader hardly knows how many famous 
writers have become familiar under other Christian 
names than those their parents gave them. Mr. 
Charles John Hougham Dickens quietly dropped his 
two middle names, probably concluding that the pro- 
duct of the extremes was equal to that of the means ; 
Mr. Cincinnatus Heine Miller, in like manner, con- 
cluded that he. would rather celebrate one name than 
be celebrated by two, and so invented one for him- 
self. He was born in one of the best parts of Indi- 



62 Poets^ Homes. 

ana, the Wabash region, on November lo, 1841, and 
Hved there for thirteen years, when Hulins Miller, his 
father, determined to go to Oregon with his family. 
That was long before the days of Pacific railroads, 
and even the weary wagon ride across the plains was 
neither safe nor expeditious. What with the monoto- 
nous drive across the level countiy, and the difficult 
passage of the Rocky Mountains, it was three months 
before the destination, the Willamette Valley, was 
reached. Of course as little baggage as possible was 
taken, but household stores and cooking utensils were 
a neccessity ; and it not infrequently happened that 
prowling Indians, or equally covetous wild beasts, made 
a swoop for plunder on such little bands of pilgrims. 
The long solemn marches by day ; the perilous en- 
campment by night, when watch-fires were built to 
keep off animals, and muskets were loaded as a pre- 
caution against Indian invasion ; the every-day com- 
panionshijD of all that is grand and inspiring in natu- 
ral scenery — all these things impress a boy quite as 
much as a man, and to their existence is doubtless 
due much of young Miller's later love of poetry. He 
was thirteen years old, an age, when, if ever, come 
romantic dreams of adventure and discovery. But 
what other boys were eagerly reading in the novels of 



yoaquin Miller. 63 

James Fenimore Cooper, was present before Miller's 
very eyes. 

There were seven in the family, four of the children 
being sons and one a daughter. Eugene City, in 
Lane County, Oregon, was their new home, but young 
Cincinnatus was not long content to remain in a re- 
gion which to most would have seemed sufficiently 
romantic. The California mining excitement had 
now been raging for five years, and thither went the 
lad to try his fortune as a gold-digger. He contrived 
to make money enough to pay his current e:;penses,: 
and very likely had, with all the rest, his "flu. '.1 " days 
and his months of deepest poverty. 

He weat back to Oregon in 1859 witliout the 
princely fortune he had pictured to himself in his 
dreams, and was soon stung by one of the most praise- 
worthy of ambitions, that of getting a little " book- 
learning." He was still a mere boy, only eighteen,, 
and the books he studied were of an elementary de-^ 
scription. It is hard for a lad who has been out in 
the world to content himself long with the restraints 
of a school-room, and Miller soon got out of that irk- 
some place. 

ArtemusWard once remarked of Chaucer that "he 
was a great poet, but he couldn't spell ; " and we 



64 Poets' Homes. 

shall not hurt Joaquin Miller's feelings if we say that 
both statements are true in his case. The poet, in 
fact, takes some pride in his phonetic disregard of 
current orthography, for, as he himself says, "you 
can't expect a fellow to write, and spell, and do every- 
thing." 

Then followed a year as pony-express driver, in 
which the ordinary dangers of a teamster in the west^ 
ern wilds were aggravated by the fact that he must 
carry the United States mails, which were favorite 
prey both for Indians and whites. Back again in Eu- 
gene City, the miner, express-driver, and school-boy 
made his belated entry into literature by assuming 
the editorship of TJie Eugene City Reinew, to which 
he soon began to contribute poems signed "Joaquin," 
a nickname he had brought home with him from Cal- 
ifornia. The publication of this paper was stopped 
for political reasons. His habit of scribbling verse 
had been begun long before, but he printed nothing 
until he became satisfied that the public, that is, his 
public, would like it. Miller is a curious union of ut- 
ter independence of, and of suitable deference to, the 
world at large. He writes what he must, and he 
prints what he chooses. 

The poet's migrations were continued by a settle- 
ment at Canyon City, in Grant County, Oregon, where 




Joaquin Millkr. 



yoaquin Miller. 67 

he unexpectedly appeared as an attorney-at-law, though 
his legal investigations must have been of a some- 
what limited extent. But he was brilliant and indus- 
trious, and soon was honored by an election as Judge 
of Grant County. The cases tried before him were 
not less interesting and romantic than everything else 
in his career, but they were not so many as to leave 
him no time for writing. Poem after poem was writ- 
ten, to be elaborated or thrown away as pleased the 
poet's fancy. 

By 1869, after three or four years' rather monoto- 
nous service in his judicial capacity, the poet had ac- 
cumulated quite a bundle of manuscript, and a selec- 
tion therefrom was printed at his own expense in a 
little volume whose circulation was gratuitous. Joa- 
quin wished to see what the public thought of his po- 
etical ambition, and so he sent copies of his book to 
his friends and to the editors of papers in California 
and Oregon, nearly all of whom returned a favorable 
verdict. 

Made happy by this expression of opinion in his 
favor, but longing for the appreciation of a wider and 
more critical world. Miller went to London in 1870, 
his family having been broken up in a way that has 
never ceased to be a grief to the poet. Whether the 
choice of London was a piece of sagacity or of good 



68 Poets' Homes. 

luck, it is not important to discuss, but it was most 
fortunate that he, of all our poets, went to a place 
whose literary traditions and fashions were utterly 
foreign to the themes and the manner of an Oregoni- 
an's productions. Arrived in London, he had little 
money, and so he prudently took humble lodgings in 
a garret, saving his available funds for the printing of 
a sample volume of verse. His friend Walt Whit- 
man's first book was shabbily printed on cheap paper 
by Whitman himself, but Miller, wisely guaging the 
fastidiousness of the London public, produced his 
thin volume in the handsomest typography of the 
Chiswick Press. The collection at once attracted at- 
tention, especially of the Rossetti family and other 
members of the school of poets and artists known as 
"pre-Paphaelites." Between Miller and these people 
— the Rossettis, Swinburne, Morris, Marston, Payne, 
and O'Shaughnessy — there was near kinship both in 
tastes and in style. The Englishmen, sick of formal- 
ity and artificiality, liked the breezy freedom of the 
poet of the far west : and he, in turn, was influenced 
by them in the improvement of his lyrical expression, 
which lost none of its fire by being impressed within 
more careful bounds. 

The old publishing house of the Longmans, in con- 
sideration of the merit of the specimen poems and 



yoaquiti Miller. 69 

the recommendations of Mr. Miller's new and power- 
ful literary friends, brought out a volume of poems, 
"Songs of the Sierras," in 1871. The poet may al- 
most be said with truth, like Lord Byron, to have 
waked up one morning to hnd himself famous. Lord- 
Houghton, that cheery patron of young literary men, 
clambered up Miller's attic stairs to find him sleeping 
under a buffalo robe ; and the long-haired poet, with 
red shirt, and trousers tucked into his boots, was soon 
the most noticeable figure in many gatherings of Lon- 
don celebrities. Almost all the leading papers and 
magazines praised his book, and so, like Washington 
Irving, Miller was enabled to return to his own coun- 
try with a reputation already secured. His book was 
published in Boston the same year, and made a sen- 
sation scarcely less, though of course Americans were 
more familiar with his subjects and general manner 
than Englishmen could be expected to be. 

Since the time of this first great success Joaquin 
Miller has published six other books : " Songs of the 
Sun-Lands ; " " The Ship in the Desert ; " " Life 
amongst the Modocs ; " " The First Fam'lies of the 
Sierras;" "The One Fair Woman," and "The Bar- 
oness of New York." Of these the Modoc volume is 
a collection of prose sketches of wild life among the 
Indians, chiefly written for English readers ; " The 



70 ' Poets' Homes. 

One Fair Woman " is an Italian novel; and "The 
First Fam'lies of the Sierras " is mingled sketch and 
story. The others are poetry, of which the lesser 
pieces were for the most part already printed in vari- 
ous periodicals. " The Ship in the Desert " and " The 
Baroness of New York " are longer single works 
which first appeared in book form. 

Mr. Miller's poetry is never prosy, but his prose is 
hardly less poetical than his verse, especially in its 
descriptive passages. For instance. Mount Shasta is 
"lonely as God, and white as a winter moon." It 
would be hard to choose nine words which should 
be so daring and yet not irreverent, so carelessly 
chosen and yet so exquisitely fit. Mr. Miller also 
has a good sense of humor and describes life in the 
outskirts of civilization with cleverness and power, 
both in sketch and story. As a social satirist, or a 
novelist of life under the old civilizations, he is less 
successful. Cities he began by cordially hating ; New 
York, when he entered it for the first time, seemed to 
him " a big den of small thieves." Later, however, 
he has gloried in hunting out metropolitan by-wa3'^s, 
and London low life has had no more appreciative 
observer. Nature, he knows thoroughly and loves 
with a steady affection ; the abodes of man he either 
curses too malignantly or magnifies too highly. 



yoaquin Miller. 71 

We have said that Joaquin Miller is a poet without 
a home. Although increasing fame has compelled 
him to live within reach of his publishers, and large 
literary revenues as author and playwright — for he 
has written a successful drama, " The Danites " — 
have come to him, he still retains his fondness for 
travel, and has laid the old world and three continents 
under contribution for desultory study. In 1873 he 
sailed for Europe for the second time and returned in 
1875, in time for the Philadelphia exhibition of 1876, 
which was to him a scene of the greatest interest. 
While abroad he passed through the Mediterranean 
to Eg}'pt, which seldom saw a more suggestive sight 
than this Oregonian, standing reverently beside the 
Nile or beneath the pyramids. On the way back he 
lingered long in Italy, which so charmed him that we 
half began to fear that a second American poet — 
William W. Story was the first — would be stolen 
from us by the Italian sky. Venice was specially 
dear to the poet, and for Rome he felt mingled like 
and dislike, glorying .in its age and hating its squalor. 
The aim of the " pre-Raphselite " poets to whom we 
have alluded is to be faithful to nature in the minut- 
est particulars, and yet to make the baldest language 
glow with feeling. Taking this for a test, was their 
design ever better fulfilled than in this remarkable 



72 Poets' Homes. 

poem on the eternal city ? We are sometimes tempted 
to call it the best thing Joaquin Miller ever wrote, 
notwithstanding his Indian maidens, Nicaraguan ad- 
ventures, or Rocky Mountain pictures : 

ROME. 

" Some leveled hills, a wall, a dome 

That lords its gilded arch and lies, 

While at its base a beggar cries 
For bread and dies ; and this is Rome ; 

" A wolf-like stream, without a sound, 

Steals through and hides beneath the shore, 
Its awful secrets evermore 

Within its sullen bosom bound ; 

" Two lone palms on the Palatine, 
A row of cypress, black and tall, 
With white roots set in Caesar's hall. 

White roots that round white marbles twine ; 

"They watch along a broken vtall, 
They look away toward Lebanon, 
And mourn for grandeur dead and gone, — 

And this was Rome, and this is all. 

" Yet Rome is Rome, and Rome she must 
And will remain beside her gate, 
And tribute take from king and state 

Until the stars be fallen to dust. 

" Yea, Time on yon Campanian plain 
lias pitched in siege his battle-tents, 
And round about her battlements 

Has marched and trumpeted in \a'n. 



yoaquin Miller. 73 

" These skies are Rome ! the very loam 
Lifts up and speaks in Roman pride ; 
And Time, outfaced and still defied, 

Sits by and wags his beard at Rome ! " 

But " one touch of nature makes the whole world 
kin \ " not only that fondness for new-fashioned toys 
which led Shakespeare to make this famous saying, 
but also one throb of poetry or one sight of anything 
that inspires poetry. And so Joaquin Miller, wher- 
ever he is, in a pony-express saddle, in an Oregon 
judge's chair, fighting with Walker in Nicaragua (we 
had almost forgotten that episode in his career ), in a 
poor London attic, beside the pyramid of Cheops, on 
the Bridge of Sighs in Venice, or with the newsboys 
in the cheapest gallery of the theatre where his play is 
produced, is always a sunny and warm-hearted lyrist, 
who tries to take the world for all it is worth and to 
increase its happiness. 

Almost every one of our leading American poets is 
of handsome or striking appearance. But none of 
them — the kindly-eyed Longfellow, the aged and 
Socratic Bryant, the brown-haired Lowell, the shaggy 
Whitman — is more noticeable on the street than 
Joaquin Miller. When he first startled London, like 
a fresh chill breath from his own Sierras, he was a 
weird object. His hat was of the broadest-brimmed 



74 



Poets'' Homes. 



and most ancient variety, his shirt was violent red, 
his rough trousers were tucked into his cavaher boots, 
and it was hard to say whether his hands or his watch- 
chain were adorned with the greatest ' quantity of 
''barbaric gold." His hair was very long and fine, 
and both his beard and hair were of a curious tawny 
color, not unlike the red gold now in vogue. In later 
years, whether from a happy thought or the sugges- 
tion of some friend 1 know not, he has assumed less 
uncivilized apparel, and nowadays, though his coat 
and cloak are of simple cut, their cloth is of the finest, 
and a rose or two is apt to bloom in the button-hole. 
The peculiarity of Miller's face is its sunny smile which 
is a pleasure to see. In conversation he talks very 
fast, and with a poet's hatred of too long dalliance 
with any single subject. 

He has as many eccentricities as a dozen ordinary 
poets ; and in opinions as in clothes he is not, in 
Emerson's phrase, "the slave of his yesterdays." 
But still, with all his whim-whams and foibles, he 
is dipoet, in the sense in which the word is true of Shel- 
ley, and Keats, and Swinburne, and James Russell 
Lowell. 

He has never written a children's poem, perhaps 
because it seems to him the hardest of all tasks to do 
as it ought to be done. But in one of his Palestine 



Joaquin Miller. 75 

poems he has given such a pretty picture of the scene 
when the mothers of Judah brought their Httle ones 
to Christ for a blessing that every child will be glad 
to read it here : 



"They brought Him their babes, and besought him, 

Half kneeling, with supphant air. 
To bless the brown cherubs they brought him. 

With holy hands laid in their hair. 

"Then reaching his hands he said, lowly. 

' Of such is My Kingdom ; ' and then 
Took the brown little babes in the holy 

White hands of the Saviour of men ; 

a 
" Held them close to his heart and caressed them, 

Put his face down to theirs as in prayer. 
Put their hands to his neck, and so blessed them, 

With babv hands hid in his hair." 



ELIZABETH STUART PHELPS. 

AT the Senii-Centennial of Andover Theological 
Seminary, on August 4th, 1858, one of the 
speakers made the following remarks : 

" There is one spot near us which has to me more in- 
teresting associations than any other on these grounds. 
I refer to the Study of the Bartlett Professor. If 
its unwritten history could be published it would 
form an interesting chapter in the religious history of 
our country and of Christendom. It would reveal 
suggestions of wise forecast, original plans of useful- 
ness, the starting of thoughts and movements and in- 
76 



Elizabeth Stuart J 'helps. 'j'j 

stitutions amidst conference and prayer, the influence 
of which has gone to the ends of the world. Soon 
after its occupancy b}^ the second Professor of Rhetoric 
in 1S12, there was established in it a weekly meeting 
for prayer, and for devising ways and means of doing 
good, . . . And in this little meeting there were 
planted and cherished into growth many germs which 
are now plants of renown and trees of life. In An- 
dover the scheme of Foreign INIissions first assumed 
the visible and tangible form which gave rise to the 
American Board, and Mills was one of the four stu- 
dents whose names were signed to that memorable 
paper drawn up here (in this study) and which, after 
consultation, was presented to the General Association, 
and led to the formation of the earliest and largest 
Foreign IMissionary Association in our land. Here, 
too, was instituted the Monthly Concert. The pro- 
posal of such a union of Christianity in America 
as had already existed in Scotland was made and con- 
sidered at tiie meeting in this Study. 

" In 1 8 13, Dr. Porter (the Bartlett Professor) pur- 
chased a little book, when the thought strikes him that 
by associated action and contribution, religious publi- 
cations might be made cheaper, and more generally 
diffused. Tiiis thought was presented to the little 



78 Poets' Homes. 

meeting of brethren in this Study, and at once grew 
into the New England Tract Society. 

" The question has been more than once raised — 
' Who originated and established the first religious 
newspaper in the world ? ' A witness still living 
states positively, as a matter of personal knowledge, 
that the ' Boston Recorder ' had its birth in Dr. Por- 
ter's Study. 

" The want of a Society, national in its operations, 
for aiding young men in their education for the minis- 
try is felt. It is talked over at the Study-meeting at 
Andover ; and as the result there arises the American 
Education Society. 

"That the American Bible Society was originated 
through any influence proceeding from Andover is not 
affirmed \ yet certain it is that before it was organized 
in New York the importance of such a national insti- 
tution, in addition to the Massachusetts Bible Society, 
was a matter of special consultation in this circle of 
brethren. And it may be stated with confidence that 
the American Home Missionary Society was the re- 
sult of thouglits and suggestions that went forth from 
this place. Encouragement from this Study organ- 
ized an Association of Heads of Families for the 
promotion of Temperance, and the first name on the 
pledge is E. Porter; the six following names are of 



Elizabeth Stuart PIicIJ^s. 8 1 

Professors and resident Trustees. Moreover, about 
this time there was a consultation at this Study 
which resulted in the formation at Boston of the 
American Temperance Society. 

"More recently, while occupying this Study of 
hallowed memories, he (Dr. Edwards) determined to 
devote himself to promoting a better observance of 
the Sabbath. After laboring only two and a half 
years he witnessed, as the result mainly of his influence 
and efforts, a National Sabbath Conveiition of seven- 
teen hundred delegates from eleven different States, 
presided over by an ex-President of the Union, John 
Quincy Adams." 

Imagine entering this august Study a delicate little 
girl, three years old, with dark-brown hair, large blue 
eyes, a rather long thin nose, and a mobile mouth 
never at rest — under one arm a kitten with a pink 
ribbon tied round its neck, under the other a large doll 
(Miss Annie) elegantly attired in clothes of unrivalled 
splendor, a lamb with a blue ribbon half hidden 
amid its wool following her, and you have Elizabeth 
Stuart Phelps when she made her first appearance in 
her present home. 

What cares the child for all the wonderful wealth of 
association garnered in this wonderful Study ! 



82 Poets' Homes. 

On the sofa sits her mother ; to reach her before the 
kitten scratches her hand, or the lamb runs away, or 
the bits of splendor drop from Miss Annie — that is 
all the child wishes. 

Prayer-meetings, "great movements and influences 
that have gone to the ends of the world " — perhaps a 
hallowed breath from them all may be lingering here 
still, and may rest on this young child's head in a 
benison, who can tell ? The only thing certain is that 
the kitten, the doll, and the lamb, are not what they 
seem ; there is a marvellous story to tell mother, — how 
the doll is a queen, and the kitten is her child, and was 
drownded, and the lamb was a good man who pulled it 
out of the water, and gave it some milk, and it wasn't 
dead any more, and the queen was glad and took her 
hank'chef and wiped her tears, and put on her best 
gown and told her child never to be drownded again ; 
so they were happy all together and have come to see 
their mother. And the mother, looking up and smil- 
ing, draws the child to her, strokes the resuscitated 
kitten, bestows words of praise upon the valiant lamb 
and adjusts the flying splenxlors of "Queen Anne " with 
deft and tasteful fingers. 

The house occupied by Professor Phelps was orig- 
inally designed by Dr. Griffin, a man of more taste 
than judgment, at least in house architecture. He 



Elizabeth Stuart Phelps. 83 

received from Mr. Bartlett — the donor of the 
house — liberty to erect such a dwelling as he 
pleased ; and with little reference to climate or ex- 
pense he raised a large edifice, handsome and costly 
for the times in which it was built — 1812 — indeed, 
handsome and costly now. The main part of the 
house consisted of two large rooms with a wide hall 
dividing them. There was a narrow hall, used partly 
for closets and partly for passage way, separating the 
parlor from a broad, open piazza facing the west. On 
the north and south ends of the house were two wings 
— one was the study, the other the kitchen. The 
study was on the southern side, a large, high room 
with six windows, opening to the east, west and south, 
and an ample fireplace. 

Transplant that room to Florida, and one can 
hardly be imagined more perfect ; but for bleak, cold 
Andover hill one would almost suspect Dr. Griffin to 
have come to a late knowledge of its possibilities, when 
we read that he resigned his professorship before the 
house was ready for his occupancy. His successor, 
an invalid, at once proceeded to diminish the propor- 
tions of the Study to a livable size. He put in a 
partition, cutting off four windows, leaving, how- 
ever, the book-shelves with their arched top, which 



84 Foefs Ho7nes. 

had been builded into the walls. Thus it remains 
until the present day. 

Of the room, as it was when Professor Phelps first 
occupied it, I can give you little idea. Coming into the 
Professorship, a young man with only a small library, 
everything was done that could be to give it the home 
look of a true Study. With limited means, there could 
be no gathering of costly pictures, statues, or even the 
more common luxuries of a well appointed library. 
With his own hands the Professor made some frames 
of a light wood to hold his few engravings ; but the en- 
gravings were those of the masters, and Mrs. Phelps, 
with rare taste and skill in all matters pertaining to 
house decoration, and trained from her babyhood to 
feel that " the study " was to be made the room of the 
house, worked assiduously to furnish such little articles 
as give to a room that look of grace and culture so 
few can bestow, so many acknowledge. 

Of this mother, who died when Elizabeth was 
only eight years old, much might be said, but we 
must content ourselves with the few recollections of 
her which her child yet retains. 

In due course of time the piazza was enclosed and 
made into a large, inconvenient dining-room ; but 
here, every winter evening, when " the children's hour " 
came and the lamps were lighted, Mrs. Phelps took 



Elizahtth Stuart F helps. 85 

her two little ones (there was a brother three years 
younger than the girl) and read to them from the old 
English poets ! Think of these children thus enter- 
tained at an age when Mother Goose, or at best some 
nice, practical story with a good moral, would be con- 
sidered fit milk for such babes ! Stories, too, their 
mother told them ; stories when they were good and 
when they were naughty, but always classic stories, 
tinged deeply with old English lore. 

It was no wonder therefore that the little daughter 
began early in life to make stories of her own. 

The grounds surrounding Professor Phelps' house 
are ample, and laid out in keeping with the house. 
There are two gardens, one designed for the 
culture of flowers and choice fruit trees, the other 
for vegetables. In the lower there is a summer-house, 
and here, more than anywhere else in the world, was 
the little Elizabeth's home. It was, literally, a small, 
square house, very unlike what would be called 
a summer - house now ; but the readers of her 
juveniles would feel more sympathy with it 
than with any other of her Homes. Here she couki 
go with her playmates and have a world of her own. 
A square room with two large windows and a large 
door offered every convenience and temptation to 
indulge in any recreation the fancy of the moment 



86 Poets' Homes. 

chose. Such dolls' Jiouses as you might have seen, 
with such queens and kings and princes and prin- 
cesses j such weddings and funerals ; such schools 
and sick beds and nurseries ; such mimic life, — 
not that scholastic life which the children saw every 
day around them, but a life read of in the story- 
books, or dreamed of in the already affluent imag- 
ination of this young child. Her mother had read to 
her of the Indians and of the wonderful discoveries 
that are made by people digging through mounds, so 
she collects whatever she thinks best resembles the 
description of those articles, and buries them in a 
corner of the garden ; then, having roused her com- 
panions to the proper pitch of enthusiasm, she leads 
them solemnly to the spot and tells them " to dig," 
Imagine their astonishment when they unearth first 
one article and then another, until the wonders are 
all exposed, and the ghosts of the red men seem act- 
ually stirring in the still air around them ! 

Just behind the vegetable garden is a large open 
field with a pretty little grove of common forest trees 
in one of its corners. Here was another of our little 
heroine's Homes; and here the children spent most of 
the pleasant summer hours. If this grove could tell 
tales, I should put up my pen and we would listen to it, 
for it knows a great deal better than I do what passed 



'!" i 




Elizabeth Stuart Phelps. 89 

under its shadows. It could point out to you the broad 
branches upon which houses were made with bits of 
board ; where the squirrels were hunted to their nests, 
and how the little hands put in rather than took out 
nuts ; how the boy was "boosted " up long before he 
could climb, to explore a half hidden nook where they 
were sure birds were nesting ; how the girls, half 
shame-faced, yet already with a budding of "equality," 
followed after, or else went above him, daring him 
from the slim upper branches to come if he could ; 
and then, how the three, with torn clothes and 
scratched hands and faces, sat panting in some deep, 
cool recess and rested, while the future author peopled 
for them the whole woods with good and bad fairies 
until, half scared by the vivid realities she brought, 
they took to flight, seeking refuge among the grown- 
up people of a more real Avorld. 

When she was eight years old her mother died, 
and the child's life was changed. Just what it might 
have been had she lived, who can tell } Certain it is 
that in their tastes and aptitudes they were alike. 
The lonely, dreamy childhood would no doubt have 
been filled with an active, perhaps rigorous, prepara- 
tion for the life's work. 

For years, now, this child followed nearly the bent 
of her own will. She was obedient, morbidly consc'i- 



go Poets'' Homes. 

entious, affectionate and care-taking of tliose she loved. 
Naturally an artist in its broadest sense, she was 
always busy creating. As the days of dolls and baby 
houses, kittens and lambs, went by, she made her own 
world, peopled it with sentimental and tender per- 
sonages, and passed through dramatical experiences 
as unique as, unreal. In costume she took espe- 
cial delight, amusing herself by adjusting bright 
colors into fantastic dresses, either upon her 
own slim", tall figure, or upon that of her young 
play-fellow. Color has always been to her a 
source of great enjoyment. One of her few remem- 
brances of her mother is of this mother sitting at 
work with bright worsteds, the shadings of which, as 
they passed through her thin fingers, lose no jot or 
tittle of their brilliancy as time goes on. The years 
of early school-girl life were, as might have been ex- 
pected, not the pleasantest for such a temperament, 
yet the girl learned easily and ranked high. It was 
no effort for her to commit a lesson, excepting in 
Arithmetic. 

But at fourteen years of age a new era in her life 
began, one to which she looks back, as time goes on, 
with deeper and deeper gratitude. 

The widow of one of the Andover Professers, a 
lady of original ability and thorough culture, opened 



Elizabeth Stuart Phelps. gi 

a school, and to this the young girl was sent. The 
course of study upon which she at once entered was 
thorough and marked by a singular adaptation to the 
wants ot the pupils. While there was, of course, a 
system, there were generous and skilful departures 
from it, in order to meet the needs of the different 
minds under training. Psychology in its various 
branches soon became her favorite study, and she was 
led along its difficult and intricate paths with a firm, 
strong hand, and in a manner which to this day elicits 
her war/nest admiration. So with English Literature 
and the Fine Arts. Of her Latin drilling Miss Phelps 
speaks also with sincere regard, fully appreciating 
its thoroughness, and the skill which made the dead 
a living language to her. 

"In short," she says, "with the sole exception of 
Greek and the higher mathematics, we pursued the 
same curriculum as our brothers in college." Excel- 
lent tutoring, this, as will readily be seen, for the life's 
work before her. At nineteen, the ordinary modes of 
education having been followed and a rather extraordi- 
nary result obtained, she began the work which she has 
since so successfully carried on. So far she had clung to 
her Andover home and her Andover life. Beyond that 
house which Dr. Griffin had built, that Study of won- 
derful memories, those ample grounds growing every 



92 Poets' Homes. 

year more and more enchanting under her father's 
tasteful care, the old summer-house (by turns her stu- 
dio, her study, her parlor and best resting-place), the 
grove, peopled now by memories instead of fairies, 
she had no world and no wish to find one. Delicate 
in health, she could not be induced to exchange the 
monotony of a very monotonous scholastic life for 
any other ; and therefore, when most young ladies 
would have been intent on the enchantments of the 
" coming out," she turned to writing stories and books 
for occupation. Would you like a glimpse into the 
' room where she wrote the " Trotty " and the " Gipsy" 
books, beside many shorter stories, all of which I 
presume the most of our young people have read 
without knowing to whom they were indebted for them ? 
This room was a long narrow chamber built over that 
dining-room where the child first received her lessons 
in English Literature from her mother. Its one west- 
ern window looks out upon a view seldom equalled in 
New England. Just below it lies the summer-house, 
the terraced gardens, and in the soft meadow next 
them the beloved grove ; beyond these stretched a 
broad, mountain-broken horizon behind which the 
sun sets in a glory with which Italy's skies can 
hardly vie. Writing of a visit to Andover, and of 
this scenery, Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes says : " Far 



Elizabeth Stuart Phelps. 95 

to the north and west the mountains of New Hamp- 
shire lifted their summits in a long, encircling range 
of pale blue waves. The day was clear and every 
mound and peak traced its outline with perfect defini- 
tion against the sky. Monadnock, Kearsarge, — what 
memories that name recalls! — and the others, the 
dateless pyramids of New England, the eternal monu- 
ments of her ancient rule, around which cluster the 
homes of so many of her bravest and hardiest children. 
I can never look at them without feeling, vast and 
remote and awful as they are, there is a kind of in- 
ward heat and mufHed throb in their stony cores that 
brings them into a vague sort of sympathy with human 
hearts. It is more than a year since I have looked on 
those blue mountains, and they ' are to me as a 
feeling' now and have been ever since." 

That they have always been to Miss Phelps " as a 
feeling " from her earliest childhood, no one familiar 
with the love of nature inwrought into her writings 
can doubt. 

The room was simply furnished, but in it, more 
than in any other of her Homes, were garnered the 
treasures we prize so highly when we stand, tip-toed 
and eager-eyed, waiting for the lifting of the veil that 
separates childhood from maidenhood. In this room 



96 Poet's Homes. 

hung the chromo of the " Immaculate Conception, of 
which she writes thus : 

" Perhaps you wonder why I chose 

This single-windowed little rooTi 
Where only at the even-fall 

A moment's space, the sunlight's bloom 

Shall open out before the face 

I prize so dear ; I think, indeed, 
There's something of a whim in that, 

And something of a certain need. 

I could not make you understand 

That solitude which sickness gives 
To take in somewhat solemn guise 

The blessings that enrich our lives. 

I like to watch the late, soft light, — 

No spirit could more softly come ; 
The picture is the only thing 

It touches in the darkening room. 

I wonder if to her indeed. 

The maiden of the spotless name. 
In holier guise or tenderer touch 

The annunciating angel came. 

Madonna Mary ! Here she lives ! 

See how my sun has wrapped her in I 
O solemn sun ! O maiden face ! 

O joy that never knoweth sin — 

How shall I name thee ? How express 

The thoughts that unto thee belong ? 
Sometimes a sigh interprets them, 

At other times, pcrha]:)s, a song ; 



Elizabeth Stuart Phelps. 97 

More often still it chanceth me 

They grow and group into a prayer 
That guards me down my sleepless hours, 

A sentry in the midnight air. 

But when the morning's monotone 

Begins, of sickness or of pain, 
They catch the key and, striking it. 

They turn into a song again." 

There she wrote "Gates Ajar;" but not long after 
the publication of that book she found it necessary to 
make some changes in her mode of life which would 
give her hopes of firmer health and more quiet in 
which to pursue her literary work. The summers she 
spent at the seaside, — East Gloucester, after a few trials 
of other places, being her chosen resort ; and her win- 
ter Study was removed from her father's house to the 
next door neighbor's where she spends the working 
hours of the day, " having learned," she says, " like 
the ministers who study in their churches, or the 
carpenters who go to their benches, the value of a 
workshop out of the house," 

This house is one of the oldest on Andover Hill 
and its history would be a perfect epitome of the pe- 
culiar life of a secluded New England literary town. 
It has been occupied in turn by Professors, Trustees, 
Agents, Commons, Stewards. Farmers, yet has retained 
a character of its own through all the changes. 



gS Poets'' Ho7nes. 

It is a long, low, extremely plain house, painted 
white, with plenty of little narrow windows filled witli 
little green panes of glass. Miss Phelps' Study is the 
southeast corner chamber. It has two windows front- 
ing to the east and to the three brick Andover Theo- 
logical Seminaries. The broad gravel walk leading 
to the old chapel with its fine avenue of trees is di- 
rectly before them, and the Library with its half med- 
ieval walls is on one side, with the new chapel on 
the other. All the day the sun shines in as cheer- 
fully as it can, struggling through those little win- 
dows and those little panes. There are subdued 
green curtains at these windows ; and about the 
room are books, pictures, a few easy chairs, tables, 
and many of the nothings which make a study pleas- 
ant. 

Here, Miss Phelps has written all her later books. 
It is a quaint, old-time room, with big beams coming 
down from the ceiling, from which a hammock is al- 
ways suspended, and beams coming out of the cor- 
ners which are convenient for out-of-the-way be- 
longings; and here, on the southern broad window 
sill, lies constantly her blue Skye-and-King-Charles 
terrier, " Daniel Deronda." Miss Phelps has centered 
all her early love for pets in devotion to dogs. Cu- 
rious stories miaht be told of her fondness for a lost 



Elizabeth Stuart Phelps. 



99 



dog, named Hahnnemann, and his love for her, did the 
limits of this article allow; but a sketch of her 
homes would be incomplete did not " Dan " take 




Daniel Dekonua." 



his place as a prominent figure. Dan is not bigger 
than a medium sized cat, and is altogether, as some 
one remarked, " so homely that he is almost hand- 
some." Indeed he seems to affect people facetiously 



loo Poets' Homes. 

and to occasion a sort of humor which would alone 
give him a right to live. " That dorg, " said an Irish- 
man pointing to him with a broad smile on his red face, 
" came jist near being no dorg at all." But, little as 
he is, he has for his mistress, one of the biggest of 
hearts. His bark of delight when he finds her after 
a short separation is touching to hear, and his jeal- 
ous and chivalric care of her is ludicrous in the 
extreme. Sitting on his small haunches, he boldly 
defies the world to molest her, and has been known 
to attack a clog ten times his size, when he thought 
the Newfoundland's approach meant evil. Noble lit- 
tle bit of a Dan ! It is not too much to say that he 
could teach lessons of reverence, fidelity and love, for 
the learning of which the whole human race would 
be better. 

Miss Phelp's Andover home, however, remains 
with her father and step-mother, the value of whose 
kind friendship many years have tested. 

The situation of her summer home at Gloucester 
can find no more fitting description than the one Miss 
Phelps has herself given in her story, " The Voyage 
of the America." Writing upon the view of the 
rocks on which her house stands, she says : 

" Upon the rich and tortured hues which the beating 
water and the bursting fire opened for my pleasure 



Elizabeth Stuart J 'helps. loi 

ages ago, falls the liquid August sunlight as only- 
Gloucester sunlight falls, I think, the wide world over. 
Through it the harbor widens, gladdens to the sea ; 
the tide beats at my feet a mighty pulse, slow, 
even, healthy and serene. The near waves curve 
and break in quiet colors across the harbor's 
width ; they deepen and purple if one can place 
the blaze of the climbing sun upon them. A 
shred or two of foam curling lightly against the cliffs 
of the western shore whispers that far across the 
broad arm of the Point the sleeping east wind has 
reared his head to look the harbor over. Beneath 
the bright shade of many-hued sun-umbrellas the 
dories of the pleasure people tilt daintily. At the 
distance of nearly two miles, the harbor's width, I can 
see the glitter of the cunners, caught sharply from the 
purple water, as well as the lithe, light drawing of a 
lady's hand over the boat's side against the idle tide. 
All along the lee shore, from the little reef, Black 
Bess, to the busy town, the buoys of the mackerel 
nets bob sleepily ; in and out among them, with the 
look of men who have toiled all night and taken 
nothing, glide the mackerel fishers, peaceful and poor. 
The channel where the wind has freshened now is 
full. The lumber schooner is there from Machias, 
the coal bark bound for Boston, the fishing sloop 



J02 Poets' Homes. 

headed to the Banks, The water boat trips up and 
down on a supply tour. A revenue cutter steams out 
and in importantly. The government lighter struts 
by. A flock of little pleasure sails fly past the New 
York school ship, peering up at her like curious ca- 
naries at a solemn watch-dog. A sombre old pilot- 
boat, indifferent to all the world, puts in to get her 
dinner after her morning's work, and the heavily 
weighted salt sloop tacks to clear the Boston steamer 
turning Norman's Woe. And Norman's Woe ! the 
fair, the cruel, — the woe of song and history, — can 
it ever have been a terror ? Now it is a trance. Be- 
hind is the Hendsa greens of the rich inhabited shore 
closing up softly ; upon it the full light falls ; the jag- 
ged teeth of the bared rock round smoothly in the 
pleasant air, the colors known to artists as orange 
chrome and yellow ocher and burnt Sienna caress 
each other to make the reef a warm and gentle thing. 
Beyond it stirs the busy sea. The day falls so fair 
that half the commerce of Massachusetts seems 
to be alive on its happy heart. The sails swarm like 
silver bees. The black hulls start sharply from the 
water line, and look round and full, like embossed 
designs, against the delicate sky. It is one of the 
silver days, dear to the hearts of the dwellers by the 
shore, when every detail in the distance is magnified 



Elizabeth Stuart Phelps. 105 

and sharp. I can see the thin fine line of departing 
mast heads far, far, far, till they dip and utterly meet. 
Half Way Rock, — half way to Boston from my lava 
gorge, — rises clear-cut and vivid to the unaided eye as 
if brought within arm's length by a powerful glass. 
And there the curved arm of Salem shore stretches 
out, and Marblehead turns her fair neck towards us \ 
in the faint violet tinge of the outlines I can see pale 
specks where houses cluster thickly. Beyond them 
all, across the flutter of uncounted sails which fly, 
which glide, which creep, which pass and repass, wind 
and interwind, which dare me to number them, and 
defy me to escape them — dim as a dream, and fair 
as a fancy, I can distinctly see the long, low, gray 
outline of Cape Cod." 

The house itself is built upon a lot of greensward 
which runs down amid some great, beetling rocks. It 
is the cunningest nook in all the world to hold the 
home of one who loves the sea — you feel inclined to 
apply to it Miss Phelps own words : 

" If it might only be 

That on the singing sea 

There were a place for you to creep 

Away among the tinted weeds and sleep, 

A cradled, curtained place for two. 

You would choose just this, and no other. 



io6 Poets'' Homes. 

It is a two story brown cottage, with doors and 
windows opening out upon a piazza, which is built 
across the side facing the sea. 

UiDon the interior Miss Phelps has bestowed much 
of the peculiar artistic taste, which distinguishes her. 
The parlor is a long narrow room tinted with a deli- 
cate green shade, not a sea green, but the green one 
catches in the opal of a wave as the sunset lights it. 

In the other rooms of the house the same taste has 
directed that one should be rose pink, another robin's 
egg blue, another delicate shades of buff and brown, 
another the native colors of the wood. 

The house is filled with the remembrances of those 
who love her ; and, with the books and pictures that 
she loves and with the constant society and sympathy 
of friends, the lady whom you know as the author of 
" Gates Ajar " and " The Story of Avis " here draws 
into her quiet days and invalid life the courage and 
the calm of the summer sea. 

I cannot close this sketch more happily tlian by 

quoting from her " Saturday Night in the Harbor : " 

" The boats bound in across the bar, 
Seen in fair colors from afar, 
Grown to dun colors, strong and near, 
Their very shadows seem to fear 
The shadows of a week of harms, 
The memory of a week's alarms, 



Elizabeth Stuart Phelps. 107 

And quiver like a happy sigh 
As ship and shadow drifting by 
Glide o'er the harbor's peaceful face 
Each to its Sabbath resting-place. 

And some like weary children come 
With sobbing sails, half sick for home ; 
And some, like lovers' thoughts, to meet 
The velvet shore, spring daring, sweet ; 
And some, reluctant, in the shade 
The great reef drops, like souls afraid 
Creep sadly in ; against the shore 
Ship into shadow turncth more 
And more. Ship, ocean, shadow, shore, 
Part not, nor stir forevcrmore." 



WILLIAM CULLEN BRYANT. 

WHEN William Cullen Bryant was born, Byron 
was an active little fellow, six years old ; 
Shelley was learning to walk ; the young Words- 
worth, in the depths of poverty, had contrived to 
bring out two thin volumes of poetry, bearing the 
stilted titles of " The Evening Walk, Addresses to a 
Young Lady," and " Descriptive Sketches taken dur- 
ing a Tour through the Alps ; " Walter Scott was 
studying German, and thinking of publishing, as his 
first book, a couple of translations from that lan- 
guage ; Coleridge was selling his manuscript poems 
to a generous friend ; Lamb was happy over the get- 
ing of a desk in the East India house ; and Goethe 
was writing the closing chapter of " Wilhelm Meis- 
io8 




WILLIAM LULLli.N hKVA.NT. 



William Cullen Bryant. iii 

ter." Washington was President of the United 
States ; Alexander Hamilton was Secretary of the 
Treasury ; Aaron Burr was in the Senate ; young 
Andrew Jackson, having married Rachel Donelson, 
was practising law in Nashville ; John Quincy Adams 
was beginning his political career as minister to Hol- 
land ; Jefferson, deeming his public life at an end, 
was cultivating his Monticello farm ; and the whole 
country was still mourning the recent death of 
Franklin ; while abroad, George the Third sat 
on the English throne ; and Napoleon Bonaparte, 
a young Corsican officer, had just attracted no little 
attention by his brilliant reduction of Toulon. 
There is no need to say, therefore, that Mr. Bry- 
ant's literary life, beginning in 1804 and ending in 
1878, was virtually contemporary with the whole 
growth of American literature. Of all our eight 
tliousand two liundred and seventy-five periodicals, 
not a dozen were published in 1794, the year of Mr. 
Bryant's birth. Surely an author who was the senior 
of seven presidents of the United States, and whose 
literary career in New York alone was uninterrupted 
from 1826 to 1878, might fairly be called a living his- 
tory of American letters. Only Richard Henry 
Dana, Senior, of all our surviving poets, was born 
before Mr. Bryant ; but the latter, unlike his Massa- 



112 Foeti Homes. 

chusetts friend, who has long lived in retirement, was 
an active worker up to the day of his death in that 
most perfunctory and imperious of literary pursuits, 
the editing of a daily newspaper. 

William Cullen Bryant was born in Cummington, 
Massachusetts, in 1794. Cummington, a little Hamp- 
shire County town, was a small village then, and to- 
day it contains barely a thousand inhabitants. But, 
besides giving birth to Bryant, it is proud to number 
among its natives Luther Bradish, a New York poli- 
tician of note, in his time, and Henry L. Dawes, one 
of the present senators from Massachuseits. There 
seems to be something in its fresh mountain air favor- 
able to longevity ; for the Rev. Dr. Snell, one of 
Cummington's sons, baptized and buried the people 
of North Brookfield, Massachusetts, for the space of 
sixty-four years. 

The scenery of Cummington, with its nooks and 
fields, and dashing Westfield river, gave the boy 
Bryant his first liking for, and knowledge of. Nature. 
His father. Dr. Luther Bryant, the village physician, 
was both guide and friend, teaching his little son how 
to think wisely and how to write well, as well as lead- 
ing him through the natural scenery which became 
almost a part of his very self. What was his father's 
nature, and what the value of his teachings, Mr. 



William Culleii Bryant. 115 

Bryant has told us in more than one poem. This is 
from the " Hymn to Death : " 

" He is in his grave who taught my youth 
The art of verse, and in the bud of life offered me to the 
muses. • • • • 

When the earth 
Received thee, tears were in unyielding eyes, 
And on hard cheeks, and they who deemed thy skill 
Delayed their death-hour, shuddered and turned pale 
When thou wert gone. 

This faltering verse, which thou 
Shalt not, as wont, o'erlook, is all I have 
To offer at thy grave, — this, and the hope 
To copy thy example." 

"O'erlook," in this quotation, is an unfortunate 
word ; but to supervise, and not to pass by, is its 
evident meaning. This " Hymn to Death " was not 
written until 1825. Two years later, Bryant men- 
tioned his father and his loved sister in equally affec- 
tionate language : 

" Then shall I behold 
Him, by whose kind paternal side 1 sprung, 

And her, who, still and cold, 
Fills the next grave,— the beautiful and young." 

Similar fervent tributes to their fathers, to whom 
they felt that they owed an equal debt, have been 



1 1 6 Poets'' Homes. 

paid by other famous American poets ; notably by 

Holmes in the lines ending : 

" Now, from the borders of the silent sea, 
Take my last tribute ere I cross to thee ! " 

It was well that Dr. Bryant exercised a critic's 
wisdom in pointing out his son's defects of style, and 
physician's discretion in caring for his health ; for 
the boy was writing verses at the age of nine, and at 
ten saw one of his poems printed in a local news- 
paper. Those were stirring political times, from 
1805 to 18 1 5, and the young poet's thoughts, as he 
grew into his teens, turned to national subjects. 
"The Embargo," by Bryant, appeared in 1809, and 
very accurately reflected the hatred commonly felt in 
New England toward the prevailing policy of the 
national administration. The little volume which 
contained this vigorous piece of satire was printed in 
Boston at Dr. Bryant's expense. It contained a few 
general poems — an ode to the Connecticut river and 
a poem on Drought, among others. These two are 
wonderful pieces for a boy of fifteen to write, though 
to the reader of to-day they seem like clever parodies 
of the poet's- maturer style. Probably the records of 
literary precocity from the days of Chatterton down 
to little Lucy Bull and the Goodale sisters have never 
shown a more remarkable example. 



William Culleii Bryant. 117 

The poem of " Thanatopsis " was written in Cum- 
mington when Bryant was in his nineteentli year, and 
in 18 1 6 it was published in The Nor* h American Re- 
iiiew. That periodical would now seem the last place 
in which to look for poetry. But it had been started 
in 1815, the year before it printed " Thanatopsis," as 
a bi-monthly magazine, devoted to articles in general 
literature, as well as the reviews and political papers 
to which it afterwards gave up the whole of its space. 
As first printed, "Thanatopsis" was somewhat 
shorter than in its present form ; and the author 
afterwards changed a few expressions. When the 
poem was sent to the office of the Review, that peri- 
odical was conducted by a club, of which R. H. Dana 
was chairman for the time being. With it was sub- 
mitted the lines afterward called an " Inscription on 
the Entrance to a Wood." Somehow, Dana got the 
impression that " Thanatopsis " was written by the 
young poet's father. Dr. Br}^ant, then a member of 
the State Senate. So he ran over to the State-house 
to see how the author of so notable a production 
looked. He was disappointed in his searcli for partic- 
ular evidences of poetical ability in the face ; but he 
did not learn of his mistake until 1821, when the real 
author went to Cambridge to deliver his poem of 
" The Ages " before the Phi Beta Kappa society of 



ii8 Poets' Homes, 

Harvard Universit}'. For five years, therefore, The 
North American Review was ignorant of the author- 
ship of the most famous article it ever printed. 

Though the majority of Mr, Bryant's long literary 
life was spent in and near New York, Massachusetts 
may fairly be called his literary home. He was the 
poet of Nature, and the Nature of his poems is that 
which smiles across New England meadows or frowns 
behind New England hills. Not until he was thirty- 
two years old did he leave western Massachusetts 
In 1810 he entered Williams College. Williamstown, 
the seat of the college, lies in the northern part o\ 
Berkshire count}^ in the midst of the peerless hills 
and the bold scenery which have made the region 
famous. At Williams, Bryant did not graduate, 
though the college was afterwards proud to give him 
his bachelor's degree. Oddly enough, this was also 
the experience of the venerable Dana at Harvard. 
After practising law a brief time in little Plainfiekl, 
also in western Massachusetts, Mr. Bryant returned 
to Berkshire and settled in Great Barrington, which 
was his home for ten years. That town, by its situa- 
tion and scenery,, doubtless influenced his poetry 
more than any other of his places of residences. 

Great Barrington is a fit home for a poet. The 
gentle Housatonic River, having idly passed by 



William Culkn Bryant. 121 

Lenox and Southbridge, saunters through green mead- 
ows and hides beneath dark hills until it reaches 
Sheffield, a few miles below. To the north, rugged 
and forbidding, rises Monument Mountain, famous for 
that wild leap of the Indian girl which forms the sub- 
ject of one of Bryant's finest poems. Toward Egre- 
mont on the west and New Marlboro on the east, the 
country roads ascend gently sloping hills. The town 
itself lies half hidden beneath tall elms that seem to 
share the river's calm. 

In Bryant's time, the green growth of grass and 
leaves was less disturbed than now ; but, even to- 
day, one may easily see what inspiration surrounded 
the poet. The modern visitor needs but to walk from 
the gray Episcopal church to the silent graveyard at 
the southern end of the village. This walk beneath 
generous elms, the path now skirting the street and 
now climbing the hill above, is enough to make the 
dullest observer thmk poetry even if he cannot write 
it. 

In 1825 Mr, Bryant removed to New York, having 
concluded, as Longfellow, Lowell, and other famous 
poets have done, to abandon law for literature. He 
had accumulated quite a number of poems, for so fas- 
tidious a writer, in his Great Barrington residence ; 
and when, on his removal, he assumed the editorship 



122 Poets' Homes. 

of The New York Review and Athenccum Magazine 
( afterwards called The United States Review and Lit- 
erary Gazette^ he was able to produce several fine 
pieces in rapid succession, among which were "The 
Death of the Flowers/' " The Indian Girl's Lament," 
and " The African Chief." Under Bryant's editor- 
ship, this monthly also contained the new poems of 
Dana, R. C. Sands and Fitz-Greene Halleck, whose 
" Marco Bozzaris " first appeared in its pages. 

Between 1827 and 1830 appeared three issues of 
" The Talisman," a literary annual of the fashion 
once so popular both in this country and in England. 

It was by far the best work of its kind ; and, to this 
day, its neat little volumes with their green sides, gilt 
tops, clear type and delicate steel-engravings, are the 
aristocrats of the old book stands. 

" The Talisman " was wholly written by Bryant, 
Gulian C. Verplanck and Robert C. Sands, Ver- 
planck writing about half of the whole. Bryant's 
prose contributions to it are especially worth hunting 
out by the curious. They are written in the finished 
style of the " Knickerbocker School," — a style sug- 
gesting comfort and sober luxury both in literature 
and life ; and they are noted for the delicacy of their 
humor. Not every modern reader knows that Bryant 
could write a forcible and interesting prose story ; but 



William Cullen Bryant. 123 

his few writings in that line are really worth compari- 
son with the tales of Irving, 

But the greater part of Mr. Bryant's prose appeared 
in The Evening Fast of New York, upon which he 
took an editorial position in 1826, and with which he 
was connected up to the day of his death. A daily 
paper, twenty-four hours after its issue, is a poor 
dead thing ; but neither its ephemeral value nor its 
inexorable demands discouraged the active pen of 
the veteran editor. Mr. Bryant willingly put the 
same care and honesty into a perishable editorial 
which he bestowed upon a poem. In a long run this 
faithfulness tells ; and to it is largely due the solid 
reputation and influence of the paper he built up. 

The whole body of Mr. Bryant's writings, aside 
from his uncollected editorial work, is not large. 
One volume of moderate size contains all his poems ; 
his books of travel he did not care to retain in print ; 
and a very small corner of the shelf contained all his 
books until the appearance of his translations of the 
Iliad and Odyssy, and the stately first volume of the 
History of the United States, which he began to pre- 
pare with the aid of Sidney Howard Gray. 

Like Gray and Collins, Bryant chose to write little 
and to write well. He was always a stern critic of 
his own work and did not hesitate to change his man- 



124 Poets' Hofnes. 

uscript after it had left his hands. Some stanzas 
which did not quite suit him would say themselves 
over and over again until the riglit word or phrase 
came at last, and the correction was made. But this 
revision was, for the most part, before publication ; 
for when one of Bryant's poems was printed its au- 
thor, as a rule, permitted it to stand. 

It is said that Mr. Bryant hardly shared the popu- 
lar opinion that ." Thanatopsis " is the best of his 
poems ; nor was it unnatural that he should resent 
the ill-considered praise of those who did not seem 
to know that he wrote anything in the sixty-three years 
since the appearance of his famous meditation on 
death. 

The William Cullen Bryant of 1878, up to the very 
day of his fatal attack last May, was one of the most 
familiar figures in the streets of New York. His hair 
and beard were snowy white, and his overhanging 
eye-brows and deep-set eyes gave him an air of in- 
tense thought. Not even Longfellow or Walt Whit- 
man so closely resembled some Greek philosopher. 

In one sense Bryant, in his later years, seemed far 
younger than he was ; in another, one might readily 
fancy that he had lived for centuries. A man of so 
reverend appearance seems almost independent of 
time. His striking face has always been a great fa- 



William Cullcn Bryan^. 127 

\'orite with photographers and artists in crayon. Per- 
sons who had only seen his portraits were apt to be 
disappointed when they met him, to see no more mas- 
sive a figure. But Mr. Bryant, though slight and lat- 
terly somewhat bent with years, had none of the un- 
shapeliness or haggardness of old age, and his port 
was a pleasure to see. 

It is pretty hard to give the outside of a New York 
house any of the characteristic attractiveness which 
so soon becomes apparent in an author's home in a 
country town. In the city nearly every house is like 
its next neighbor, and only its interior becomes ut all 
individual. 

For some years Mr. Bryant's city home was num- 
ber twenty-four West Sixteenth Street, beiween Un- 
ion Square and the College and Church of St. Fran- 
cis Xavier. As it was entirely unpretentious without, 
so it was handsome rather than splendid within. It 
was a home, not a mere house ; and it was filled with 
the paintings, and marbles, and rich books, which a 
poet likes to gather about him. 

The death of his wife, ten or twelve years ago, led 
Mr. Bryant to seek solace in his Homeric transla- 
tions ; since that time the head of his household has 
been his daughter Julia, who was her father's constant 
companion. From this Sixteenth Street home Mr. 



T28 Poets' Homes. 

Bryant, to the last, walked to his office every week- 
day and to his church every Sunday. The horse-cars 
would pay sorry profits were all New Yorkers as rig- 
orous pedestrians as he. The new office of The 
Eveniwg Post is more than two miles distant from his 
Sixteenth Street home, but the active old man scorned 
to make his trips thither on wheels. He even, when 
the elevator happened to be full, sturdily walked up 
to the editorial rooms, nine flights above the side- 
walk. Such a pull as this seems formidable to many 
a man of a quarter of his years. 

This hardihood was the result, in Mr. Bryant's case, 
of regular exercise before breakfast with Indian clubs, 
and of abstinence from narcotics and intoxicants. 
Even tea and coffee he used sparingly, chocolate be- 
ing, on the whole, his favorite beverage. 

One of Mr. Bryant's most agreeable characteristics 
was his accessibility and his kindliness toward 
younger and obscurer men. No artificial dignity 
hedged him about in house or office ; for his natural 
grandeur commanded respect from the most careless. 
He was much in company ; he not infrequently pre- 
sided over important meetings, and at the head of 
social and civic tables he was a great favorite. Be- 
ing popular at such gatherings he was naturally happy 
thereat, and such recreation proved to him refreshing 



Wiliiaffi Cullcn Bryant. 129 

rather than exhausting. His physician was un- 
doubtedly wrong in thinking that they predisposed 
him to his fatal attack. 

For more than thirty years Mr. Bryant's summer 
home was in the Long Island village of Roslyn, in 
Queen's County on the Sound, some twenty-five miles 
from New York. The little village has scarcely seven 
hundred inhabitants and is a part of the township of 
North Hempstead. Its name was given it by Mr. 
Bryant, who also presented to the village a neat pub- 
lic hall. His local attachment was strong ; and even 
to Cummington, after many a long year, he thought- 
fully gave a well-chosen public library, a mile from 
his birth-place which he owned and visited annually. 

"Cedarmere," the poet's home at Roslyn, is a ram- 
bling old-fashioned house, surrounded by lofty trees 
and long reaches of green grass. It is homelike with 
the generous wealth of cheer which comes only with 
years. No mere summering-place would satisfy Bry- 
ant. Here, within reach of New York and his news- 
paper (a steamer plies to and fro daily), he sought 
and found, in the rare prospect in the distance and 
in the rich adornment near at hand, both rest and in- 
spiration. His son-in-law, Parke Godwin, was a near 
neighbor ; but still nearer neighbors were the trees and 
the very blades of grass he knew so well. 



130 



Poets' Homes. 



And now, as he rests in the little Roslyn graveyard, 
the grass and the leaves seem still his closest friends. 
The mourners have gone away, but Nature folds her 
poet in her own bosom. 




NORA PERRY. 

MOST readers of current literature are familiar 
with the name of Nora Perry, and with some, 
if not all, of her poems. 

The grace and the beauty which characterize her 
verses have made them general favorites, and the 
names of some of them, as for example, " After the 
Ball," and "Tying her Bonnet under her Chin," have 
become household words. 

When, three years ago, J. R. Osgood & Co., 
brought out a collection of these poems in a beauti- 

131 



132 Poets' Homes. 

ful volume, one of the critics of the press, alluding to 
her remarkable facility of musical versification, called 
her a " fairy singer " ; and Mrs. Harriet Prescott 
Spofford, who is herself one of the sweetest of our 
poets, said at that time, " There are manv noble poets 
in this country, but few since Edgar Poe so purely 
lyrical as Nora Perry. Her songs seem to sing 
themselves, and their music bubbles up like the 
notes from the throat of a bird, one phrase answering 
the other in exquisite melody, till it seemo as if tune 
and echo could do no more." 

If my young readers wonder at these words of 
lofty praise, they have only to turn to Miss Perry's 
volume to find them verified. 

Take the opening stanzas of " In June " as an illus- 
tration : 

" So sweet, so sweet the roses in their blowing ; 

So sweet the daffodils, so fair to see ; 
So blithe and gay the humming bird a-going 

From flower to flower, a-hunting with the bee; 

" So sweet, so sweet the calling of the thrushes, 
The calling, cooing, wooing everywhere ; 

So sweet the waters' song through reeds and rushe ; 
The plover's piping note, now here, now there." 

How charmingly musical is this description of the 
golden days of early summer ! The poem, like 



Nora Perry. 133 

many of her others, is a picture, nay, more than a 
picture, for so vividly are the scenes brought before 
us, we seem to enter personally into their gladness 
and beauty. It is summer while we read, no matter 
though the winds of winter are blowing. And for 
the moment we can hear the song of the bird and 
the drowsy hum of the bee. 

So, too, as we read " Jane," that gem of a poem 
we see the rain-drops lie sparkling upon the leaves, 
and we are certain we really smell the fragrance of 
the flowers after the refreshing summer shower. 

Nora Perry's poems are especially interesting to 
the young, for she, more than most poets, has spoken 
to them. 

That swinging, laughing poem of " Polly," which 
was first published in Our Young Folks' Magazine, 
is no doubt familiar to many readers of these 
volumes who may have heard it often recited, per- 
haps may have recited it themselves at school exhibi- 
tions and festivals, quite ignorant of the author's 
name, since it is always to be found in the newspapers, 
from Maine to Minnesota : 

POLLY. 

" Who's this coming down the stairs, 
Putting on such lofty airs ; 



134 Poets' Homes. 

• "With that hump upon her back, 

And her little heels click, clack? 
Such a funny little girl, 
With a funny great long curl 
Hanging from a mound of hair ; 
And a hat way back in the air, 
Just to show a little border 
Of yellow curls all out of order. 
She's a silly girl, I guess, 
I'm glad it isn't — Why, bless 
My soul ! it's our little Polly 
Tricked out in all that folly ! 
Well, I declare, I never 
Was so beat ; for if ever 
There was a sensible girl, 
I thought 'twas little Polly Earl. 
And here — Well, it's very queer 
To come back, after a year, 
And find my Polly changed like this, — 
A hunched-up, bunched-up, furbelowed miS3 
With a steeple of a hat 
And her hair like a mat, 
It's so frightfully frowzled 
And roughed up and tousled ! 
O Polly, Polly ! — Well, my dear, 
So you're glad grandfather's here ? 
And I confess that kiss 
Does sviack of the Polly I miss, — 
The girl with the soft, smooth hair. 
Instead of this kinked-up snare 
What ! you're just the same Polly, 
In spite of all this folly ? 
And what is that you say. 
About your grandmother's day, 
That you guess the folly 
Hasn't just begun ? — O Polly, 
If you could only have seen 



Nora Perry, 135 

Your grandmother at eighteen t 

What's that about the puffs 

And the stiffened-up ruffs 

That they wore in the time 

Of your grandmother's prime ? 

And the big buckram sleeves 

That stood out like the leaves 

Of the old-fashioned tables ; 

And the bonnets big as gables, 

And the laced-up waists — Why, sho, 

Polly, how your tongue does go ! 

Little girls should be seen, not heard 

Quite so much, Polly, on my word. 

O, I'm trying to get away. 

Eh, from your grandmother's day, 

But I'm not to escape 

Quite so easy from a scrape ? 

What, you expect me to say 

That your grandmother's day 

Was as foolish as this ? — 

Polly, give me a kiss ; 

I'm beaten, I see — 

And I'll agree, I'll agree 

That young folks find 

All things to their mind ; 

And in your grandmother's time, 

When I too was in my prime, 

I've no doubt, Polly, 

I looked at all the folly 

Connected with the lasses 

Through rose-colored glasses, 

As the youths of to-day 

Look at you, Polly, eh ? 

But I've given you fair warning 

How older folk see ; so, Polly, good-morning." 



136 Poets' Homes. 

Then the two poems, glowing with patriotism, and 

infused with the bright, impressible spirit of youth, 

that of the Boston boys who 

" protested, 
When they thought their rights molested." 

and " Bunker Hill in 1875," which latter was pub- 
lished in the Wide Awake of that year. Both have 
found an enduring home in the hearts of all New 
England boys ; while " After the Ball," the piece 
which gives the title to Miss Perry's volume of poems 
to which we have referred, has been upon the lips of 
how many bright, sunny-hearted girls, who, dreaming 
of the future and what it holds in store for them, 
after some gay gathering, like Maud and Madge 
have 



" — sat and combed their beautiful hair, 
Their long, bright tresses, one by one, 

As they laughed and talked in the chamber there, 
After the revel was done. 

" Idly they talked of waltz and quadrille. 

Idly they laughed, like other girls, 
Who over the fire, when all is still, 

Comb out their braids and curls. 

" Robes of satin and brussels lace, 

Knots of flowers and ribbons too, 
Scattered about in every place, 

For the revel is through. 



Nora Perry. 137 

"And Maud and Madge in robes of white, 
Tiie prettiest nightgowns under the sun, 

Stockingless, slipperless, sit in the night, 
For the revel is done. 

" Sit and comb their beautiful hair, 

Those wonderful waves of brown and gold, 

Till the fire is out in the chamber there, 
And the little bare feet are cold." 



Although Miss Perry is best known as a poet, she, 
nevertheless, has been a successful writer of prose, 
and many of her stories have touched the popular 
heart ; those for younger readers being especially 
happy in construction and dialogue. " Bessie's Trials 
at Boarding School " is one of the best. It is a 
delightful story, indeed, for a reader of any age, its 
only fault being its brevity. This, with other stories 
of a like nature, was brought out in a volume by D. 
Lothrop & Co., in 1876, as a Christmas book. 

Miss Perry's home is in Providence, in little Rhode 
Island, though she was a Massachusetts girl, and is so 
much in Boston that many persons have an idea that 
her fixed residence is there. 

To reach this home we go up over one of the 
beautiful hills for which Providence is noted, and, 
entering a quiet street, stop at last before a modest 
little house shaded by two branching elms. But it is 



138 



Poets' Homes. 



not the exterior, it is the interior in which we are 
most interested, for it is there that Nora Perry's 
individuality has opportunity to express itself. Ad- 
mitted to this interior we are shown into a charming 
room of which we take fascinated observation while 
we await the coming of its fair mistress. 

The heavy drapery of the windows gives the room 
a soft, subdued light, but quite sufficient to enable us 
to discover its artistic arrangement. If it is winter a 
bright open wood fire is burning before us. On the 
walls, all about, are pictures — pictures everywhere ; 
bits of painting, beautiful engravings, and choice 
specimens of photographic art. In a corner stands 
a wide writing table, and close beside it a book-case 
filled with books. 

This corner is our lady's work-shop, the nook 
where our sweet singer's songs are penned. 

While still interested with our pleasant surround- 
ings the door opens, and our poet enters. She is 
small in stature, a blonde of the purest type. She 
comes forward to welcome us with a quiet, graceful 
manner, reminding us of the graceful movement of 
her own verses. 

What we notice more particularly about Miss 
Perry is the bright smile which, as the conversation 
changes from one interesting theme to another, lights 



Nora Perry. 139 

her face with a beauty never found in the features of 
persons of less highly organized natures ; a smile 
which indicates the elastic and sympathetic tempera- 
ment, which rises above the annoyances of this world 
and somehow lifts you with it. 

As you see and feel all this, you do not wonder 
that the critics have characterized her poems as 
" healthy," a term full of meaning in these days of 
lugubrious sentimental rhyming. And as we turn 
away from our poet- and her enchanting work-shop, 
as we say good-by to the pretty, quaint room, and the 
poet herself, we naturally recall the words of that 
eminent critic, E. P. Whipple, who, in summing up 
the influence of Miss Perry's poems, says : " The 
trouble with most female poets is that they are apt to 
use verse merely to celebrate their sombre or discon- 
tented moods. They set wretchedness to music. 
But here is a poetess who is all alive with the spirit of 
sweet content and glee. She sings as a bird sings, 
from an abounding, overflowing joy of heart." 



RALPH WALDO EMERSON, 

THE home of Emerson is in Concord, Mass., as 
everybody knows. It is a plain, square, wooden 
house, standing in a grove of pine trees which con- 
ceal the front and side from the gaze of passers. Tall 
chestnut trees ornament the old-fashioned yard 
through which a road leads to the plain, yellow barn 
in the rear. A garden fills half an acre at the back, 
and has for years been famous for its roses which are 
the especial pride and care of the mistress of the 
house and are freely given to all who wish them ; this 
140 



Ralph Waldo Emerson. 143 

garden also has a rare collection of hollyhocks, the 
flowers that Wordsworth loved, and most of the old 
time annuals and shrubs. From the road a gate, 
which is always open, leads over marble flag-stones 
to the broad, low step before the hospitable door. 

A long hall divides the centre of the house, v.ith 
five large square rooms on each side ; a plain, solid 
table stands at the right of this entry, over which is 
an old picture of Diana. 

The first door on the right leads to the stud}', a 
plain, square room, lined on two sides with simple 
wooden shelves filled with choice books ; a large ma- 
hogany table stands in the middle, covered with 
books, and by the morocco writing-pad, lies the pen 
which has had so great an influence for twenty-five 
years on the thoughts of two continents. A large fire- 
place, with high brass andirons, occupies the lower end, 
over which hangs a fine copy of Michael Angelo's 
Fates, the faces of the strong-minded women frown- 
ing upon all who would disturb with idle tongues this 
haunt of solemn thought. On the mantle shelf are busts 
and statuettes of men prominent in the great re 
forms of the age, and a quaint, rough idol brought 
from the Nile. A few choice engravings hang upon 
the walls, and the pine trees brush against the win- 
dow's. 



144 Poets'' Homes. 

Two doors, one on each side of the great fire-place, 
lead into the large parlor which fills the southern 
quarter of the house. This room is hung with cur- 
tains of crimson and carpeted with the same warm 
color, and when a bright fire is blazing on the broad 
hearth reflected in the large mirror opposite, the 
effect is cheerful in the extronie. A beautiful por- 
trait of one of the daughters of the house is hung in 
this pleasant and homelike room, whose home 
circle seems to reach around the world ; for al- 
most every person of note, who has visited this coun- 
try, has enjoyed its genial hospitalit}^, and listened 
with attention to the words of wisdom from the kindly 
master of the house — the most modest and most 
gifted writer, and deepest thinker of the age. Years' 
ago the chatty, little Frederika Bremer paid a long 
visit here, a brisk old lady, as restless as her tongue 
and pen. Here Margaret Fuller and the other bright 
figures of the Dial met for conversation and consulta- 
tion. Thoreau was a daily visitor, and his wood- 
notes might have been unuttered but for the kind en- 
couragement he found here. The Alcotts, father and 
daughter, were near neighbors, and it was in this 
room that Mr. Alcott's earliest " Conversations " were 
held, now so well known. Here, too, old John 
Brown was often to be met, a plain, poorly-dressed 




WAU30 EMBRSON. (From Phjto graph.') 



Ralph Waldo Emerson. 147 

old farmer, seeming out of place, and absorbed in 
his own plans until some allusion, or chance remark, 
would fire his soul and light up his rugged features. 
Hawthorne, the handsome, moody, despairing genius, 
there woke from his morbid reveries ; and here Cur- 
tis, the graceful writer, the silver-tongued orator, in- 
dulged in his merry satire, which spared neither 
friend or foe. 

But a dozen volumes would not give space enough 
to mention in full the many guests from foreign lands, 
who have been entertained at this house, which is 
also a favorite place for the villagers to visit. The 
school-children of Concord are entertained here 
every year with merry games and dances, and they 
look forward with great interest to the eventful oc- 
casion. 

The house was partially destroyed by fire in the 
spring of 1873, and was rebuilt as nearly as possible 
like the former. During the building a portion of the 
family found shelter in the Old Manse, the home of 
Mr. Emerson's grandfather, while Mr. Emerson him- 
self visited Europe. Upon his return an impromptu 
reception took place ; the citizens gathered at the 
depot in crowds, the school children were drawn up 
in two smiling rows, through which he passed, greeted 
by enthusiastic cheers and songs of welcome. All 



148 Poets' Homes. 

followed his carriage to the house and sung " Home 
Sweet Home," to the music of the band. A few days 
afterward he invited all his fellow-citizens to call and 
see him in his new home, and nearly all the inhab- 
itants availed themselves of the opportunity, 

A general invitation is now very often extended to 
old and young, to assemble on Sunday evenings in 
the pleasant parlor for conversation. Many of these 
talks have been led by Mr. Alcott, as before men- 
tioned. Some have been of religious nature, espe- 
cially those led by the Rev. Mr. Channing, and by 
Rev. Mr. Reynolds, the pastor of the Unitarian 
church. 

The house stands on an old country road, up which 
the British marched on the memorable 19th of April, 
1775. Let us follow their footsteps, which history 
and legend have kept distinct for over one hundred 
years. 

In full uniform, just from the masr^acre at Lex- 
ington, they marched in upon the Common, and 
were drawn up before the old church of which the 
grandfather of Ralph Waldo Emerson was pastor. 
The Sunday previous he had preached his famous 
sermon, on the theme, " Resistance to tyrants is 
obedience to God," and Hancock and Adams had 
fired the hearts of the people in the same building, 



Ralph Waldo Emetson. 151 

which now contains some of the very timber which 
sustained the famous Continental Congress of that 
day. Major Pitcairn, who commanded the British, 
took up his post on the hill opposite, probably near 
the spot shown in the picture, where the tomb of the 
patriot preacher now stands. 

The Rev. William Emerson was a very energetic 
and fearless man, and had assembled his people very 
early in the morning, and delivered to them a stirring 
address, advising resistance, at whatever cost, and it 
is said that his people were so anxious for his safety 
that they compelled him to remain all day a prisoner 
at the Old Manse. Soon after he joined the army as 
chaplain, and died in consequence of the exposure 
and the fatigues of the camp. His tomb is on the 
burying-hill overlooking the old church where he 
labored so nobly. Tradition declares that he deliv- 
ered his famous speech that morning, under an elm 
which stands on the Common, and which is known to 
have been in existence at that time. A hundred 
years later, when the descendants of the same men 
who fought that day returned from the bloody battle- 
fields of the south bearing in honor the same ancient 
names and assisted at the dedication of the monu- 
ment to their comrades who were "faithful unto 
death," the present Mr. Emenson delivered an ad- 



152 



Poets' Homes. 



dress, standing in the shadows of the same noble old 

elm, making true the lines in the ode sung on that 

day: 

" The patriot-preacher's bugle call, that April morning knew, 
Still lingers in the silver tones of him who speaks to you." 

This notable tree is an American elm of perfect 
symmetry of shape, and shades a circle of one hun- 
dred feet in diameter ; and it stands an enduring 
monument to the valor and eloquence of three gen- 
erations. (I must add that it has been said to have 

been used as a whip- 
ping post, and that 
the iron rings to 
which the culprits 
were fastened, are 
still buried in its 
mighty trunk.) 

After a short halt 
on this Common, the 
troops proceeded up 
the street a quarter 
of a mile, past the 
Old Manse to the 
North Bridge, a hun- 
dred rods farther 
on, and there the fight, ever memorable in American 
historv, occurred. 




ON rue BUR\INC-HILL. — 
TOMB OF REV. WILLIAM 
^. EMERSON. 



Ralph Waldo Emerson. 153 

The spot on which the British fought has long been 
marked by a plain, granite monument, a portion of 
the inscription upon which was written by Mr. Em- 
erson, who also delivered at its dedication the famous 
poem, which cannot be too often quoted : 

" By the wide bridge that arched the flood, 
Their flag to April's breeze unfurled, 

Here once the embattled farmers stood, 
And fired the shot heard round the world. 

The foe long since in silence slept; ~ 

Alike the conqueror silent sleeps ; 
And Time the ruined bridge has swept 

Down the dark stream that seaward creep-;. 

On this green bank, by this soft stream. 

We set to-day a votive stone ; 
That memory may their dead redeem, 

When like our sires, our sons are gone. 

Spirit, that made these heroes dare 

To die and leave their children free. 
Bid time and nature gentlv spare 

The shaft we raise to them and Thee.'' 

For the side where the Americans fought, Mr. 
D. C. French, a young sculptor of the town, has de- 
signed a bronze statue of the Minute Man of the 
day, with wonderful truth and vigor of action ; and it 
is visited daily by people who come from far and 
near, and the bridge, which has been built by the cit- 
izens of the town to copy the old North Bridge, is 



154 



Poets' Homes. 



constantly being crossed by every description of 
veiiicle, conveying passengers to study the details of 
the monument, as the costume of the expectant sol- 




dier, the old-fashioned plough upon which he leans, 
and the old flint-lock musket which he grasps, are 
careful copies of the originals from which the young 



Ralph Waldo Emerson. 157 

artist made the closest studies. Upon a granite base 
he cut the first lines of the hymn quoted above. It 
has been well said, " Few towns can furnish a poet, a 
sculptor, and an occasion." 

As they pass over the bridge on their return, even 
the most careless visitor pauses for a moment at the 
grave of the British soldiers, who, for a hundred 
years, have lain on the spot where they were hastily 
buried on the afternoon of the fight, by two of the 
Concord men who made a grave for them just where 
they had fallen. No one knew their names, and they 
slept unwept, save by the murmuring pines, with the 
very same rough stones from the wall which have 
been the only marks for a century, until at the cen- 
tennial anniversar}^, in April 1875, the town caused 
the inscription, " The graves of British Soldiers," to 
be cut in a large granite block, which now forms a 
part of the wall near which they lie. The next year 
an Englishman, the editor of a newspaper in Boston, 
caused iron chains to be placed around, to guard the 
rough headstones from the attack of the relic-hunters, 
who have had the Vandalism to break off large pieces 
to carry away. 

The Old Manse, which has been at various times 
the home of Emerson, stands at the left of the battle- 
ground and is approached by an avenue of noble 



158 Poets' Homes. 

trees, which were originally black ash, a tree, very 
rare in this part of New England, Many of these 
ash trees have died from age, and their places have 
been supplied by elms and maples. Two high posts 
of granite mark the entrance to the avenue, which 
extends for about two hundred feet to the door of 
the house. Opposite, across the narrow country road, 
a hill overlooks the village, and gives a fine view of 
the winding river, and distant mountains. A solitary 
poplar crowns the- summit of the hill, and affords a 
landmark to the river-voyager, as it can be seen for 
miles up and down the stream. A romantic legend is 
connected with this tree, about a party of young girls 
who were at school in the Old Manse, each of whom 
caused a tree to be set out, and called by her name. 
Year by year, the girls and trees grev/ up together in 
grace and beauty. At length, one by one, the old 
ladies died, and the trees died too, until one very old 
lady and this old weather-beaten poplar alone re- 
mained. The lady for whom the surviving poplar 
was named, has gone to her rest, and the tree seems 
likely to follow before long. 

The large field at the left of the Old Manse, which 
divides it from the battle-ground, was, centuries ago, 
the site of an Indian village, and often rough arrows 
and spear-heads have been turned up by the plough. 



Ralph Waldo Emerson. 159 

The savages probably chose this gentle slope by the 
river for the sake of the fish with which it then 
abounded, for the earlier settlers report a plentiful sup- 
ply of shad and salmon, where now poor little breams 
and horn-pouts alone tempt the idle fisherman. Be- 
hind the house there extends to the river an ancient 
orchard of apple trees, which is in itself a monument 
of energy and faith, for it was set by the hoar}'- 
headed old minister, for the benefit of his descend- 
ants ; but at the age of ninety he enjoyed a rich har- 
vest to repay him for his disinterested labors. The 
house, built by him in the year 1765, and occupied by 
him the next year after his marriage to a daughter 
of the Rev. Daniel Bliss, with the exception of a few 
years when it was occupied by Hawthorne, has always 
been the home of ministers and the descendants of 
the builder. Nearly all the old New England minis- 
ters have been entertained under its roof, and many 
questions affecting the beliefs of the age have been 
here discussed and settled. The room in which this 
article is written, was the study of the Rev. Ezra 
Ripley, who married the widow of the builder of the 
home, and here thousands of sermons have doubtless 
been written. It is a small, square room with high 
wainscot and oaken beams overhead, with a huge 
fire-place where four-foot sticks used to burn on great, 
high, brass andirons. 



i6o Poets' Homes. 

It was in this room, too, that the ghost used to 
appear, according to Hawthorne, but it probably only- 
existed in his brilliant imagination. Often, on a 
winter night, the latch of the old door has lifted 
without human help, and a gust of cold wind has 
swept into the room. 

Opposite the study, is a larger room, which is mod- 
ernized by rare photographs and recent adornments, 
and is used as a parlor by its present owners, the 
grandchildren of the original proprietors. From this 
apartment a door opens into the ancient dining-room, 
in which the old-time ministers held their solemn 
feasts, and it is said that they were well able to ap- 
preciate the good cheer which covered the long table 
that nearly filled the narrow hall. In one corner of 
this room stands a tall clock, looking across at its 
life-long companion, the ancient desk of Dr. Ripley ; 
and a set of curious, old, high-backed chairs recall 
the days of our upright ancestors. 

Opposite this room is a big kitchen with its enor- 
mous fire-place, which twenty-five years ago was used 
wholly by the present. occupants for all purposes of 
cooking. The hooks which held the long, iron crane 
on which the pots and kettles hung still remain, al- 
though a modern cooking stove occupies the chief 
part of the broad hearth. 

The Old Manse was the principal house of the 




milmore's bust of EMERSON. (Owned by T. G. Afi-ileioii.) 



^ 



Ralph Waldo Emefson. 163 

town for many years, and, probably the only one which 
had two stories, as almost all of the houses of its 
period were built with a lean-to. It was also the only 
one which was built with two chimneys, thus giving a 
large garret, which is rich in the curious lumber of 
two generations, and stored with literature enjoyed 
only by the spider and the moth. In one corner, on 
the southern side, is a curious, little room which has 
been always known as the " Saints' Chamber," its 
walls bearing inscriptions in the hand writing of the 
holy men who have rested there. 

The room over the dining-room is perhaps the 
most interesting, for it was here that Emerson wrote 
" Nature " and also many of his best poems. Haw- 
thorne describes this room, which he also used as 
his study, in his " Mosses from an Old Manse," 
which was also written there. It has three windows 
with small cracked panes of glass bearing inscrip- 
tions traced with a diamond, probably by some of 
the Hawthorne family. From the northern window 
the wife of the Rev. William Emerson watched the 
progress of the 19th April fight ; and one hundred 
years later, on the same day, her grandaughter, who 
now occupies the room, pointed out to her guests the 
honored men who marched in long procession over 
the old North Bridge to dedicate the new monument 



164 Poets' Homes. 

and celebrate the anniversary of the memorable day. 

In fine weather the house is filled with guests, 
and nearly every day some curious stranger begs per- 
mission to enter the time-honored hall, which runs 
directly through the house, as the door opposite the 
main entrance opens into the orchard, and affords 
glimpses of the gentle rises be3''ond. 

At the foot of this orchard, all the renowned guests 
of the house have been accustomed to enter the boat, 
which is moored to a great rock at tlie river-brink, to 
row up the stream for half a mile to " the Hemlocks." 
All of the Concord writers have sung the praises of 
this romantic spot. After rowing up stream in the 
sun to Egg Rock, the point where the Sudbury and 
Assabet rivers unite to form the Concord, it is 
very delightful to ascend the Assabet which flows 
along in the eternal shade of its high, tree-crowned 
banks. At a sudden bend, where for years the water 
has been forced against a high, sandy bank, which it 
has washed out in irregular curves, great hemlock 
trees bend in various angles toward the river and as 
the roots are washed from their hold, they bend lower 
and lower, year by year, so that they almost touch 
the water, until in some spring freshet the last grasp 
of the tangled roots is loosened from its hold, and 
the great tree goes sailing down toward the Merri- 




AT THE HEMLOCKS. 



Ralph Waldo jEmerson. 



167 





mack and the ocean beyond. At present, the lowest 
one is twenty feet above the river, 
and the bank beneath offers a lux- 
uriant shade all hours of the day. 
'I'he quiet river slowly gliding be- 
tween its fair 
banks has always 
been loved 
by Emer 



son an 'J in- 
spired ma- 
ny o f his 
poems; 
and in sev- 
e r a I of 
them he 
has spoken 
of it as as- 
s o c i a t e d 
with his 
family and 
friends as 
in the 
"Dirge " in 
his first col- 



lection of poems 



" The winding Concord gleamed l^elow 

Pouring as wide a flood 
As when my brothers, long ago, 

Came with me to the wood." 



1 68 Poets' Homes. 

And again in the " In Memoriam," in the second 
volume : 

" Behold the river bank, 

Whitlier the angry farmers came, 

In sloven dress and broken rank, 
Nor thought of fame." 

" Yet not of these I muse, 

In this ancestral place, 

But of a kindred face, 

That never joy or hope shall here diffuse." 

Among Mr. Emerson's poems are many that chil- 
dren can understand and enjoy. In his first volume, 
published in 1847, we find the lines to '"The Rho- 
dora," and surely no one who reads them will ever 
see again the pretty, purple flower, which is one of 
the very earliest to greet us in the spring, without 
recalling the lines : 

" Rhodora, if the sages ask thee why 

This charm is wasted on the earth and sky. 

Tell them, dear, that if eyes were made for seeing, 

Then Beauty is its own excuse for being. 

Why thou wast there, O, rival of the rose ! 

I never thought to ask. I never knew ; 

But in my simple ignorance, suppose 

The self-same Power that brought me there, brought you." 

Where would you find a truer description of " A 
Snow-Storm," than in the poem bearing that title .-' and 
indeed, one great charm of all Mr. Emerson's poetry 



Ralph Waldo Emerson. 169 

is that his descriptions of nature are always true and 
real, nothing ever overdrawn. In the same volume 
is the " Humblebee," " hot midsummer's petted 
crone," and I venture to say that many a boy who 
has lain in the grass a hot summer's afternoon, and 
watched with pleasure one of the little fellows in his 
" zigzag " course, darting in and out of the flowers 
"sipping only what is sweet," has, when he grew 
older, been perfectly delighted to find that the poet 
had described the very things which he had enjoyed, 
but could not express ; and while reading, has, in 
imagination, been carried back again to the fields in 
which he then played. 

The poem called " Threnody" has touched many a 
heart, which sermons have, in vain, tried to reach. 

"On that shaded day, 

Dark with more clouds than tempests are, 

When thou didst yield thy innocent breath 

In birdlike heavings unto death, 

Night came, and Nature had not thee : 

I said, 'we are mates in misery.' 

The morrow dawned with needless glow; 

Each snow-bird chirped, each fowl must crow; 

Each tramper started ; but the feet 

Of the most beautiful and sweet 

Of human youth had left the hill 

And garden, — they were bound and still.'' 

Read, too, the pine-tree song, in " Wood-notes." 
The second volume, called " May-Day," will for 



lyo Poets'' Homes. 

the most part be more interesting to older people 
than to children, but tlie "Fourth of July Ode ;" would 
teach the highest lessons, even to a young child. For 
instance : 

" Be just at home ; then write your scroll 

Of honor o'er the sea, 
And bid the broad Atlantic roll, 

A ferry of the free. 

"And henceforth there shall be no chain, 

Save underneath the sea. 
The wires shall murmur through the main. 

Sweet songs of Liberty."' 

And the " Boston Hymn " is written in mucli the 
same strain • 

"My Angel — his name is Freedom, — 

Choose him to be your king. 
He shall cut pathways east and west, 

And fend you with his wing. 

" And ye shall succor men : 

'Tis nobleness to serve ; 
Help them who cannot help again; 

Beware from right to swerve." 

In December, 1873, there was a great meeting at 
Fanueil Hall in Boston, to celebrate the one hun- 
dredth anniversary of the throwing over the tea into 
Boston Harbor, which incident all children have 
read in their history of the United States ; and then 
Mr. Emerson read a poem which has never yet been 



Ralph Waldo Emetson. 171 

published, except in the newspapers at the time. In 
this brief mention of his poetry an attempt has been 
made simply to call the attention of children to such 
poems as they can easily understand and enjoy. Per- 
haps they must wait before they can comprehend all 
of his works, but the youngest can understand at 
once his genial nature and kind heart, for everyone, 
young or old, simple or learned, who has been for- 
tunate enough to know him, loves and honors him. 
His perfect courtesy never fails. From the humblest 
he seems anxious to learn. The modest aspirant for 
literary success finds in him appreciation and in- 
spiration, and in the hearts of his townsmen and 
friends is the truest home of Emerson. 

Mr. Emerson has an erect, slender figure, rather 
above the medium height, now slightly bowed by the 
weight of some seveoty years. His appearance, 
though dignified, is very retiring and singularly refined 
and gentlemanly. His face has a thoughtful and 
somewhat preoccupied expression, with keen eyes 
and aquiline nose. His countenance lights up with 
a rare appreciation of humor of which he has the 
keenest sense, but his chief characteristics are benefi- 
cence and courtesy, which never fails, whether ad- 
dressing the humblest pauper or the most distin- 
guished scholar. 



PAUL H. HAYNE. 

JOHN HAYNE, of Hayne Hall, Shropshire, was 
the honest and sturdy name of the most promi- 
nent of the English gentry from whom Paul H. 
Hayne counts his honorable descent. What doughty 
deeds brightened the records of the English family 
of Haynes there is no need to seek; for, in America, 
we do not care to sail across the Atlantic in search 
of knightly or courtly chronicles, so long as we can 
look at the reputation won by those members of any 
family whose names have become a part of our own 
history. 

172 



Paul H. Hayuc. 173 

The ITaynes of South Carolina, Hke the Adamses 
and Quincys of Massachusetts, have seemed to rely 
for fame rather upon the putting forth of some new 
acl\ievemcnt in each generation, than upon any proud 
contemplation of past celebrity or renown. 

For instance, there was an old Isaac Hayne, born 
in South Carolina in 1745, who, having served in a 
patriot regiment in the Revolution, was made pris- 
oner by the British in 1780 and released on parole. 
The next year, his family having been attacked by 
small-pox in Charleston, he was permitted to visit 
them ; but only to find his wife dying and one of his 
children already dead. Before being allowed to pay 
this sad visit, he was forced to acknowledge his alle- 
giance to Great Britain, though under protest, and 
with an express exemption from bearing arms. But his 
wife and child were hardly in their graves when Isaac 
Hayne was bidden to take up arms against his st.iic 
and country. The British promise being thus broken, 
Hayne considered himself free and took command 
of a regiment of South Carolina militia, which he 
bravely led until again taken prisoner in 1781. The 
exasperated Royalists hung him without trial on the 
4th of August in that year. This patriotic Colonel 
Hayne, who was a wealthy and popular planter and 
manufacturer, was great-uncle to Robert Y. Hayne, 



174 Poets' Homes. 

Webster's famous antagonist in the United States' 
Senate. 

Governor Robert Y. Hayne, Paul H. Hayne's un- 
cle, was, on the testimony of Edward Everett, gener 
ally considered to be in 1830 the foremost South- 
erner in Congressional debates, with the single ex- 
ception of John C. Calhoun. Born in Colleton Dis- 
trict, South Carolina, in 1791, he served for a time 
in the war of 1812 while still a mere youth, and be- 
came Speaker of the South Carolina House of Rep- 
resentatives in 1 8 18, when but twenty-seven years of 
age. In 1823 he was sent to the United States' Sen- 
ate, where he was the first Congressman to assert the 
doctrine that a state may arrest or " nullify " the op- 
eration of national laws in her opinion unconstitu- 
tional. 

In the defence of this doctrine he had, the year 
previous, while Governor of South Carolina, narrowly 
escaped coming into collision with President Jack- 
son. In January, 3830, his great speech in the Senate 
was delivered, a speech not only notable in itself, 
as a masterly presentation of the political doctrine in 
question, but forever to be famous as having evoked, 
in reply, the speech which Daniel Webster's latest 
biographer calls " the greatest and most renowned ora- 
torical effort " of the New England statesman. It was 



Paul H. Hayne. 175 

Greek meeting Greek \ and both Hayne and Webster 
felt that they had worthy antagonists. Indeed, as 
the story-books say, they "lived happily ever after," 
as far as their affectionate personal relations were 
concerned; for men truly great never cherish petty 
personal resentments, however strong their political 
opinions. 

Governor Hayne visited Webster at Marshfield, 
and once said of Webster's argument : " A man who 
can make such speeches as that ought never to die." 
The governor died in 1839, at the age of forty-eight, 
having, during the latter part of his life, been Mayor 
of Charleston. 

Colonel Arthur P. Hayne, his brother, was a brave 
soldier in the war of 1812, and also fought in the 
Creek and Florida Indian wars. In 1858 he en- 
tered the United States' Senate and lived through the 
Civil war of 1861 - 1865, dying in 1867. 

Of such a family, eminent in the political councils 
of South Carolina, and always ready to fight for its 
cherished principles, came the poet Paul H. Hayne. 
His father, true to the martial instincts of the family, 
was a lieutenant in the United States' Navy. 

Paul Hamilton Hayne (such is the poet's full 
name) was born at Charleston, South Carolina, on 
New Year's day of 1831, and grew up in that famous 



176 Poets' Homes. 

port, perhaps unequalled in the South for its curious 
combination of commercial activity and stately and 
aristocratic ease. Lieutenant Hayne died at Pen- 
sacola, Plorida, while Paul was an infant, leaving his 
son to be brought up in the affectionate care of his 
widowed mother. 

The boy was a happy, hearty, enthusiastic lad, 
quick to think and no dullard at his books, though 
not "precocious," in the sense in which many young 
poets delight their parents and their future biog- 
raphers. But, after all, it is a greater pleasure to see 
a wholesome, cheery little boy, with a warm heart 
and: a natural mind, than a pale little book-worm 
accumulating a store of phenomenal sayings and 
doings. 

We always hear of the precocious boys whose 
future brings the fame of a Milton or a Macaulay ; 
but who shall keep the record of the " infant phenom- 
enons " who become matter-of-fact merchants or ma- 
trons, or whose careers end in early death .? 

Thus young Hayne's teachers, while they soon 
saw that they were instructing a boy of more than or- 
dinary ability, would hardly have foretold the literary 
life he has since led ; though, to be sure, he had the 
poets' traditional hatred of mathematics. 

In the college of Charleston, however, which 



Paul H. Hayne. 179 

Hayne entered in 1847 at the age of sixteen, he 
proved himself a master in elocution and composi- 
tion, easily surpassing his fellows in both branches. 
The Hayne family are born orators, and Paul might 
perhaps, have equalled his uncle's reputation in that 
particular had his life been a public one, and had 
his voice been stronger. In his student days his 
manner as a public speaker was graceful, his ges- 
tures were fit, and his personal presence before his 
audience was of that winning quality which is some- 
times called magnetic. His voice is soft and musical, 
and, while it lacks sufficient power to fill a large 
room, its effect is manifest, marked as it is both by 
emphasis and sympathy. 

But the lad, after the usual fashion of Southern 
youth, learned other things than those which his 
tutors could teach him. When but eight years of 
age, his uncle, the famous Governor, taught him to 
shoot ; and from that time he has always had a 
hearty liking for field sports, accounting it by no 
means his feeblest power that, on a return from the 
field, he can show at least as many trophies as the 
majority of skillful huntsmen. 

Of course there came with this devotion to the 
field, an accompanying fondness for horse-back rid- 
ing. One favorite horse of his was a handsome gray 



i8o Poets' Homes. 

whose name of Loyal fitly described the faithful nat- 
ure which the horse and dog, alone of our domestic 
pets and servants, seem to possess. Loyal would ill 
brook any attempt of a stranger to mount the saddle ; 
but to his master he was always gentle, eating out of 
his hand and following him about the yard like a 
dog. 

Hayne graduated at the College of Charleston in 
1850, and soon after studied law and was admitted to 
the bar, though he never practiced. As to Long- 
fellow, Lowell and Bryant, literature seemed fairer 
than law, and whiffs from Parnassus persistently blew 
through the office window. At that time Mr. 
Hayne's fortune was such that he was not compelled 
to "work for a living," so that he was enabled to 
write poems without thoughts of the butcher and the 
baker. 

In 1852, the year after he attained his majority, 
the young poet was married to Miss Mary Middleton 
Michel of Charleston, the only daughter of Dr. VVil- 
liam Michel. Her own descent is worthy of remem- 
brance, her father having been, when but eighteen 
years of age, a surgeon in the army of Napoleon Bon- 
aparte. Dr. Michel was wounded at the battle of 
Leipsic, and received a gold medal at the hands of 
the late Emperor, Napoleon the Third. Miss Michel's 



Paul H. Hay fie. i8i 

mother was a descendant of the Frasers of Scot- 
land. 

In pursuance of his literary work, Mr. Hayne was, 
at various times, connected with many periodicals in 
his native city. In 1854 he visited the North, and in 
the following year his first volume of poems was pub- 
lished in Boston. Harper & Calvo, a Charleston 
publishing firm, put forth his second volume in 1857, 
under the title of " Sonnets and Other Poems ;" and 
the young poet began to command recognition in his 
more immediate home and in the North. 

The literary tastes of South Carolina are both 
severely critical and warmly appreciative. Critical, be- 
cause, to an extent almost unknown in other parts of 
the country, the literary diet of the educated classes 
consists of Addison's "Spectator," Fielding's "Tom 
Jones," and other standard books of the eighteenth 
century. And appreciative, because the Southern 
reader, however severe, is always quick to acknowl- 
edge any newly-discovered merit. 

The " Ode to Sleep, " in the Charleston volume, 
certainly deserved the warm reception awarded it ; 
while the sonnets of which the book was chiefly com- 
posed were, in conception and elaboration, worthy of 
comparison with the similar work of any contempo- 
rary American poet. 



1 82 Poets^ Ho77ies. 

It was not, however, until the appearance of his 
third book that Mr. Hayne won general recognition 
at the North as a leading contemporary poet. This 
was a slender volume with a long title : " Avolio, a 
Legend of the Island of Cos; with Poems Lyricnl, 
Miscellaneous and Dramatic." It was published in 
Boston in 1859. 

Meanwhile Mr, Hayne had been intimately con- 
nected in Charleston with an ambitious attempt to 
establish, in the South, a literary magazine of the 
first mark. RusseVs Magazine was its title ; in size 
and typographical appearance it was not unlike 
Blackwood^s, and it was sustained for three years 
(1857-1860) with good ability. Hayne wrote for 
it constantly, and so did Henry Timrod, William Gil- 
more Simms, William J. Grayson, Samuel H. Dick- 
son, and many another Southern author. Despite the 
hearty enthusiasm of its conductors, the magazine 
failed to win a financial success, and it died the year 
before the war. 

In 1861, when hostilities broke out between the 
North and, the South, Hayne espoused the Southern 
cause, following whither he was led by conviction and 
feeling, by personal friendship and local attachment, 
and by all the inherited political tendencies of the 
family blood. His health was not rugged, but he was 




s "M ^ 



60.4 JL , / V. l4-G^% ^^ 



Paul H. Havfie. 185 

assigned, early in 1861, to a posiiion on the staff of 
Governor Pickens of South Carolina. 

One of the New Yorlc illustrated papers at that 
time, published a portrait of "Paul H. Hayne, Poet 
and Litterateur; Aide-de-Camp to Governor Pick- 
ens." It was the face of a sensitive, thoughtful, deli- 
cate, impetuous young man, of the kind so familiar 
in both armies ; for the poet's study and the pro- 
fessor's chair furnished many a recruit to either side 
in our great Civil war, as they likewise did to the Ger- 
man arms in the Franco-Prussian war of 1870. 

Hayne, too ill to go to the field, was compelled to 
give up his military ambition, and for the next few 
years wrote almost constantly in suppott of what was. 
so soon to become the " Lost Cause." His numer- 
ous war lyrics bore such titles as these : " The Ken-' 
tucky Partisan " ; " My Motherland ; " " The Sub- 
stitute ; " " The Battle of Charleston Harbor ; " 
" Stonewall Jackson ; •"' " The Little White Glove ; " 
"Our Martyr:" and "Beyond the Potomac." The 
last named was singled out for praise by Dr. Oliver 
Wendell Holmes, in a lecture on the poetry of the 
war. 

The close of the struggle found Hayne poor and 
sick, but not utterly disheartened. His beautiful 
home in Charleston was burned just before the victo- 



1 86 Pods' Ho7nes. 

rious Northern army took possession of the city, by 
the bursting of a bomb-shell ; and the next year the 
poet removed with his wife, boy, and mother, to a se- 
cluded spot on the Georgia Railroad, a few miles out 
of the city of Augusta, Georgia. Here he has since 
made his home. 

With peace assured Mr. Hayne once more took 
up his pen and went diligently to work, in a brave 
endeavor to win support from what, in earlier years, 
had been a pastime. He assumed, in 1866, the 
editorship of The Augusta Constitutionalist, but 
utterly broke down after eight months' work. Dur- 
ing 1867 and 1,868 he was associate editor of The 
Southern Opinion, a semi-political paper published 
at Richmond, Virginia, by Henry Pollard. Hayne 
revised for this journal a long series of "Reminis- 
cences and Anecdotes of the Late War," and wrote 
all the book notices. About the same time he wrote 
numberless editorials and reviews for Southern 
Society, a literary weekly published in Baltimore. 
This industrious habit of work has never since been 
remitted. 

In 1873 Mr. Hayne, accompanied by his son 
William, paid a visit to the North, spending a consid- 
erable time both in Boston and New York, and meet- 
ing many old literary friends, as well as those whom 



Paul H. Hayne. 187 

he had come to know by correspondence. One of 
the most pleasant episodes of this trip was the visit 
paid by Mr. Hayne to John Greenleaf Whittier, 
who was then living at his old home in Amesbury. 

For Whittier's personal character, as well as his 
poems, Hayne had always felt the sincerest admira- 
tion ; and the meeting of the two poets was not the 
less cordial because the one had been the life-long 
advocate of freedom for the slave-, while the other 
had borne arms on the side of the Confederacy. 

" Legends and Lyric," the poet's fourth and best 
collection of poems, appeared in 1872 ; and a fifUi 
volume was published in 1876, entitled "The Moun- 
tain of the Lovers and other Poems." In 1873 Mr. 
Hayne edited, with an appreciative memoir, an 
edition of the poems of his friend, the late Henry 
Timrod. 

All his books have now been mentioned, save a 
small volume, published during the present year, 
containing biographical sketches of his uncle, Robert 
Y. Hayne and Hugh S. Legare, the eminent scholar 
and reviewer. These biographies were written some 
years ago and published in The Southern Review. 
Mr. Hayne has also written a memoir of William 
Gilmore Simms, and a revolutionary story in thirteen 



1 88 Poets' Homes. 

» 
chapters, neither of which has yet been published in 

book form. 

Having briefly sketched the personal and hterary 
life of the poet, a word is demanded concerning his 
position in the literature of the time. On the whole, 
taking into view the extent and variety of his work, 
Hayne must justly be called the chief living South- 
ern writer. In his poems there is a line feeling and 
a daintiness of expression which greater poets in 
standard English literature have missed. 

His sonnets delighted Leigh Hunt; his poems of 
sentiment and affection go straight to the heart ; and 
in his longer poems of classic or mediaeval theme 
he has produced narrative verse of high rank. He 
is content to be simply a poet ; and scarcely a living 
writer, in an age commonly called " utilitarian," 
more serenely pursues his own path. 

It is no wonder that so many kindly things have 
been said of him by the critics. Thus, the late John 
R. Thompson, himself a fair poet, said : 

" Hayne is a knight of chivalry, a troubadour, a 
minnesinger, misplaced and misunderstood, who 
should have lived ages ago in Provence or some 
other sunny land. What I admire in him most is his 
loyalty to his vocation and the conscientiousness with 
which he gives voice to his poetic impulses whether 
the world heeds him or not." 




MR. HAYNE's study. 



Paul H. Hay7ie. 191 

The volume of " Legends and Lyrics " undoubt- 
edly contains the poet's best work ; and in it the 
pieces enlilled " The Wife of Brittany" and 
" Dapnles " deserve chief mention and praise. 
" Daphles " has been especially fortunate, having 
won the cordial approval of Jean Ingelow, Long- 
fellow, Holmes, Whittier, Whipple, and Richard 
Grant White. Mr. Hayne's approving critics seem 
divided into three classes ; the first giving to his son- 
nets the highest place, while the second prefer his 
lyrics, and the third his narrative poems. 

" Copse Hill " is the name of the home which the 
poet has occupied for the past twelve years ; and, 
certainly, the little house shows that romance has 
not yet died out of the world, and that all the poets 
do not house themselves in brick walls or brown- 
stone fronts. 

Mr. Hayne's cottage, made of unseasoned lumber 
and neatly white-washed, stands on the crest of a 
hill in the midst of eighteen acres of pine lands, 
utterly uncultivated and affording the solemnity and 
seclusion which nature alone can give. Many of 
Hayne's poems show the influence of the Southern 
scenery at his very door. 

The interior of the cottage is cheery ; for it has 
been patiently decorated in a fashion at once artistic 
and homelike by the hand of Mrs. Hayne. The 



192 Poets'' Homes. 

walls were so uninviting that she determined to 
paper them with engravings, carefully selected from 
the current periodicals of the day. 

The room in which Mr. Hayne works, as now 
adorned, is fairly entitled to be described by that 
most aristocratic of adjectives, unique. Pictures of 
eminent men, views of noted places, and scenes of 
public interest are so arranged as to leave no break 
on the walls. The mantel and doors, even, are cov- 
ered with pictures, some of them framed in paper 
trimmings cut from the journals of fashion. 

Mr. Hayne's library consists of some two thousand 
volumes, partly saved from his original valuable col- 
lection of books, but accumulated for the most part 
by his labors as a book-reviewer. His desk, at 
which he always stands while writing, is made out of 
the two ends of the work-bench used in building the 
cottage. Mrs. Hayne has contrived to transform it 
into an antique bit of furniture. The little book- 
cases near by are made of boxes, partly covered with 
pictures like the walls of the room. 

In person, Hayne is of slight figure and medium 
height, having piercing eyes, full lips and a dark 
complexion. In manner he is inclined to be quiet 
and reserved. All his life he has been in somewhat 
feeble health, e-^pecially as regards his lungs. 



Pmd H. Hayne. 193 

"I have never known," he says, "since I was six- 
teen, what it is to feel perfectly well." But he works 
assiduously, even to the indulgence of that habit of 
enthusiastic poets — getting up at night to capture a 
fleeting idea. 

It will not be an unwarrantable intrusion into this 
happy home — most inaccessible of all the abodes of 
American authors — to copy here Mr. Hayne's 
hearty and helpful lines to his only son. " Will " is 
a boy no longer ; but advancing years have no power 
to dim such affection between father and son : 

"MY SON WILL. 

" Your face, my boy, when six months old 

We propped you, laughing, in a chair, 
And the sun-artist caught the gold 
Which rippled o'er your waving hair. 
And deftly shadowed forth, the while. 
That blooming cheek, that roguish smile, 
Those dimples seldom still ; 
The tiny, wondering, wide-eyed elf ! — ■ 
Now, fa« you recognize yourself 
In that small portrait. Will ? 

" I glance at it, then turn to you, 

Where in your healthful ease you stand. 
No beauty, but a youth as true. 
As pure, as any in the land ! 
For Nature, through fair sylvan ways, 
Hath led and gladdened all your days, 



194 



Poets' Hotnes. 

Kept free from sordid ill ; 
Hath filled your veins with blissful fire, 
And '.vinged your instincts to aspire 

Sunward and Crodward, Wi.l ! 

"Long-limbed and lusty, with a stride 
That leaves me many a pace behind, 
You roam the woodlands, far and wide, 
You quaff great draughts of country wind ; 
While tree and wild-flower, lake and stream, 
Deep shadowy nook, and sunshot gleam. 
Cool vale and far-ofi hill, 
Each plays its mute mysterious part 
In that strange growth of mind and heart 
I joy to witness, Will. 

" * Can this tall youth,' I sometimes say, 
' Be mine, tny son f It surely seems 
Scarce further backward than a day. 

Since, watching o'er your feverish dreams 
In that child-illness of the brain, 
I thought ( O Christ, with what keen pain ! ) 
Your pulse would soon be still, 
That all your boyish sports were o'er. 
And I, heart-broken, never more 
Should call or clasp you, Will ! 

" But Heaven was kind, Death passed you by. 

And now upon your arm I lean, 
My second self, of clearer eye, 

Of liner nerve, and sturdier mien ; 
Through you, methinks, my long-lost youih 
Revives, from whose sweet founts of truth 
And joy I drink my fill ; 
I feel your every heart-throb, know 



Paul H. Hayne. 195 

What inmost hopes within you glow ; 
One soul's between us, Will ! 

" Pray Heaven that this be always so ; 

That even on your soul and mine, 
Though my thin locks grow white as snow, 
The self-same radiant trust may shine. 
Pray that while this, my life, endures, 
It aye may sympathize with yours 

In thought, aim, action, still ; 
That you, O son { till comes the end ), 
In me may find your comrade, friend. 
And more than father, Will 1 " 



J. BOYLE O'REILLY. 





y Mac and O' 

Ye well may know 
True Irishmen alway." 

Thus says the old proverb ; and true 

Irishman, from his crown of black hair to 

the feet which take him over the ground 

in soldierly strides, is John Boyle O'Reilly, 

the poet whose name heads this paper. 

It is natural enough that his step should be soldierly ; 

for it is not many years since the fingers that now hold his 

pen were familiar with the sabre hilt, and since the feet, that 

196 



% Boyle O'Jui/Ij. 197 

now tread the quiet streets of Boston, obeyed the call 
of the bugle in an English barrack. That was in 
the days when the poet-editor was a Revolutionist, 
working for Ireland's independence, and working as 
many another Irishman has done in vain. 

He was but nineteen years old in those days. He 
is thirty-four now, graver and calmer in manner, but 
scarcely less eager to enter into a fight for principles 
and for men that he loves. 

He was born in 1844 in Dowth Castle, County Meath, 

and grew up there, studying from books with his father 

and mother, and from their store of legends and 

songs with the peasantry of the neighborhood, and 

learning from both to love Ireland, the oppressed, 

the beloved, the little black rose or dark Rosaleen, of 

whom her sons sing in the ballad : 

"The judgment hour must first be nigh 
Ere you shall fade, ere you shall die, 
My dark Rosaleen." 

He did not stay at home many years. Irish boys 
are worse than Yankees for running away and estab- 
lishing themselves in life ; and when very young he 
found himself in England, working sometimes as a 
printer and sometimes as a reporter on the papers in 
the manufacturing districts, and acquiring that inti- 
mate knowledge of workingmen, and that sympa- 



198 Poets' Homes. 

thy with them which still clings to him, and is only 
less strong than his national enthusiasm. 

But his native land was still, first in his heart, and 
in 1863 he devoted himself entirely to her service, 
and enlisted in the Tenth, Prince of Wales' Hussars ; 
not to fight for England, but to plot for Ireland. At 
that time, wherever half a dozen Irishmen were gath- 
ered together, one of them, at least, was sure to be a 
Fenian, or Irish Republican, pledged to secure liberty 
for his country. For three years O'Reilly worked 
with these men, and, while outwardly a well-drilled, 
obedient soldier, clothed in "England's cruel red," 
he never ceased to plan for the day when the " wear- 
ing of the green" might again be permitted. 

The time came when it seemed as if the blow 
might be struck, and Ireland might be free. But, as 
has happened scores of times before in her history, 
the plot for her deliverance was betrayed by a spy, 
and the men who would have broken her chains 
were arrested for high treason and thrown into prison. 

For days all Ireland was in a state of terror, as 
warrant after warrant was served and cell after cell 
filled by her patriot sons. And then came the trials 
and the sentences, and Mr. O'Reilly found himself 
doomed to imprisonment for life. His punishment was 
afterwards commuted to twenty years. But when one 



y. Boyle aReilly. 199 

is young one does not see much difference between 
a score of years and the rest of one's days on earth, 
and he hardly recognized the change as merciful. 

England's prisons were crowded that year, and he 
was successively an inmate of Chatham, Portsmouth, 
Portland and Dartmoor, before he was sent to Aus- 
tralia. At Dartmoor, he and his brother Republicans 
had the sad pleasure of performing the last offices 
for the American prisoners-of-war, who were shot in 
cold blood in 1814 by their British guards. The 
bodies of the slain had been flung into shallow 
graves, and when O'Reilly and his comrades were in 
the prison, the bones of the Americans lay bleaching 
on the ground in one of the prison yards, having 
been dragged from their resting-place by the prison 
pigs. The Irish Republicans collected and buried 
them, and carved " Duke et decorum est pro patria 
moriri" on the rude stone with which they were 
allowed to mark the grave, perhaps wondering, as 
they did so, whether anyone would do as much for 
them should they die while in prison. 

In 1867 they were sent to Australia, " a land 
blessed by God and blighted by man," as Mr. O'Reilly 
says ; and there they were set to work in gangs mak- 
ing roads. But the sturdy young fellow whose 
boyhood was passed in sight of the Boyne with 



200 Poets'' Homes. 

its bitter memories of defeat by the English, and 
whose youth had been .given to plotting against 
England, did not sit down contented as her prisoner. 
From the day when he first set foot on Australian 
soil he began to make plans to escape ; and over 
and over again he tried, only to be defeated. 

He learned to love " that fair land and drear land 
in the South," with its soft climate and strange scent- 
less flowers and bright songless birds. But he could 
not be content in captivity, and at last, in February, 
1869, he put to sea in an open boat, and, after days 
of privation and peril, was picked up by the Ameri- 
can whaler, Gazelle, of New Bedford, Captain David 
R. Gifford. 

Now began a new life for the young Irishman. A 
life made up of long days of watching for whales and 
spinning yarns, such as only whalers can spin, and 
other days that seemed too short for all the work and 
adventure that were crowded into them, while whales 
were captured and their precious oil stored away in 
the hold. He remained on the whaler until August, 
and then an American ship, the Sapphire, of Boston, 
bound for Liverpool, hove in sight, and Captain Gif- 
ford put O'Reilly aboard her, giving him the papers 
of a shipwrecked sailor, and lending him twenty guin- 
eas, all the money that he had. 



y. Boyle OReilly. 201 

" But if I'm recaptured in Liverpool you'll never 
get the money again," remonstrated the Irishman. 

" All right," said the Yankee ; " if they take you I 
can do without it. If you reach America I think I'll 
get it again." 

In September O'Reilly landed in Liverpool ; but 
soon found himself in danger and sailed for America, 
landing in Philadelphia and going to New York. 
Here he lectured once or twice, and sold some maga- 
zine articles to buy clothes, and in 1870 came to 
Boston, not knowing a soul in New England. 

Looking about for something to do, Mr-. O'Reilly 
naturally found his way to the newspaper offices, and 
soon had a position on the Pilot, at a salary which, 
although small at first, was soon increased. His 
countrymen made him welcome to their homes, and 
his poems, which he soon began to publish, made 
him friends among Americans ; and in a year or two 
he found himself prosperous and growing famous. 
Then he married a wife, whose sole care since her 
w^edding-day has been to make her poet's home what 
it should be. And since then, it has seemed as if for- 
tune were striving in every way to make up to him 
for the pain of his enforced exile. 

He is now the owner of one-fourth of the Pilot, the 
other three-quarters belonging to the Archbishop of 



202 Poets^ Homes. 

Boston, and is its sole editor ; so that he enjoys an 
independence that makes him the envy of all his 
brother journalists. Amonjj Irishmen ' the influence 
of the paper is wonderful, and is used with the aim 
of making them good American citizens. 

This year Mr. O'Reilly has been chosen President 
of the Papyrus Club, the organization to which the 
younger poets, magazine writers, and editors in the 
city of Boston belong; and also of the Press Club, 
of which all the newspaper men are members by 
right of office. 

Change of fortune has not altered him much in 
manner, and seems to have made little difference in 
his disposition. He still sits silent in company, 
immovable except as to his restless dark eyes, until 
somebody asks him a question ; but then the heavy 
brows are lifted, the head is raised, and the answer 
comes usually in the Milesian form of another ques- 
tion, sometimes paradoxical, sometimes a little dog- 
matic, but always striking. Unless one wants to 
rouse him to vehemence, it is best to avoid say- 
ing anything snobbish, and, above all, not to insin- 
uate that his beloved workingmen are not perfect ; 
and it is also well not to say anything against Ireland. 
Of his country he sings : 



y. Boyle aReilly. 205 

"My first dear love, all dearer for thy grief ! 
My land that has no peer in all the sea 
For verdure, vale or river, flower or leaf — 
If first to no man else, thou'rt first to me. 
New loves may come with duties, but the first 
Is deepest yet — the mother's breath and smiles; 
Like that kind face and breast where I was nursed 
Is my poor land — the Niobe of Isles." 

Mr. O'Reilly's home is in tlie Charlestown district 
of Boston, in a house facing Winthrop Park and the 
.soldiers' monument, the work of his countryman, 
Milmore. Most of his poetical work is done in his 
study, a long room occupying half of the first floor. 

The arrangement of the room shows a hundred 
signs of womanly taste, and its planning is really 
more his wife's work than his own, although it suits 
him perfectly . The moldings and panelings of the 
walls are of a warm crimson, repeated in the heavy 
curtains and the cover of the long desk at one end 
of the room, and in the comfortable lounge that in- 
vites him to rest when he has worked too long. A 
book-case, containing the volumes that he needs for 
reference, stands at the left of his chair, and another 
fills the space between the chimneys. Upon the top 
of the latter are statuettes, vases and small pictures 
innumerable, and others line the walls ; each one 
having a history for its owner, not ancestral, but 
of his own talent and energy. 



2o6 Poets' Homes. 

v/|/«>tc*i*, (J) Olt^^^ om^ riJc^i^ 




At his right hand, where he can see it whenever 
he glances up, is a little picture of Dowtli Castle, 
made for him by his brother poet. Dr. Joyce ; and 



y. Boyle aReilly. 209 

not far off is an engraving of a French picture of mil- 
itary life, on which his eyes rest fondly now and 
then, as he recalls the old days of peril and plotting. 

Here come his three black-haired little girls to ask 
papa's advice on various profound topics, and are 
chased out by mamma, only to return again and 
coax for an answer, and to receive it, no matter what 
becomes of the rhymes meanwhile. Here, too, in 
the evening, come the Papyrus men to chat, to dis- 
cuss their coming poems and books, and, if the truth 
must be told, to smoke while they talk until long 
after midnight. 

Up-stairs are his wife's parlor, the nursery whither 
his babies beguile him as often as they can, and the 
bed-rooms. But the study is the favorite resort of 
all the family, and there Mrs. O'Reilly does her own 
literary work ; for she has her share in her husband's 
labors, and edits a department in the Pilot. 

His journalistic work is done in the queerest little 
den ever seen — a tiny room in the fourth story of 
the Pilot building ; made tinier by being lined with 
book-cases, and by a litter of old newspapers and 
magazines. His desk is a wild confusion of first 
proofs, " revises," copy, slips cut from exchanges, 
old letters, poems, and leading articles for the Pilot, 
and piles of dust ; for the office-boy would sooner 



2IO Poets' Homes. 

think of dropping out of the window than he would 
dare to touch anything in the room higher than the 
floor. 

Once, when Mr. O'Reilly was away, one of his 
assistants, struck by the forlorn appearance of the 
den, had it put in order. " And what do you think," 
says the poet, "he Jiad the paint washed ! And I 
had a lot of valuable memoranda scribbled on my 
window-frame, and he had them all washed off, and 
I haven't the least idea what they were ! " 

This sad affair happened three years ago, and 
since then, if office tradition can be credited, no sim- 
ilar vandalism has been committed. 

The first volume of Mr. O'Reilly's poems, " Songs 
from the Southern Seas," was published in 1873 ; 
his second, " Songs, Legends and Ballads," which 
includes the first, in 1878. The title of the latter is 
a very good description of its contents ; for Mr. 
O'Reilly's poetry is of many kinds. The longest is 
"The King of the Vasse," an Australian legend, into 
which are woven descriptions of that scenery which 
makes Northern lands seem cold and pallid to him 
who has once beheld it. This is the picture of the 
forest : 

"The shadows darken 'neath the tall trees' screen, 
While round their stems the rank and velvet green 



y. Boyle O'Reilly. 211 

Of undergrowth is deeper still ; and there 
Within the double shade and steaming air, 
The scarlet palm has fixed its noxious root, 
And hangs the glorious poison of its fruit; 
And there, 'mid shaded green and shaded light, 
The steel-blue silent birds take rapid flight 
From earth to tree and tree to earth ; and there 
The crimson-plumaged parrot cleaves the air 
Like flying fire, and huge brown owls awake 
To watch, far down, the stealing carpet-snake 
Fresh skinned and glowing in his changing dyes, 
With evil wisdom in the cruel eyes 
That glint like gems, as o'er his head flits by 
The blue-black armor of the emperor-fly. 



And high o'erhead is color; round and round 
The towering gums and tuads closely wound 
Like cables, creep the climbers tn the sun, 
And over all the reaching branches run 
And hang, and still send shoots that climb and wind 
Till every arm and spray and leaf is twined. 
And miles of trees, like brethren joined in love, 
Are drawn and laced ; while round them and above, 
When all is knit, the creeper rests for days, 
As gathering might, and then one blinding blaze 
Of very glory sends, in wealth and strength 
Of scarlet flowers, o'er the forest's length." 



Among the other poems are several that relate 
horrible stories in a powerful fashion, such as "The 
Dukite Snake, " the tale of a poor settler who killed 
one of the dreadful red serpents of Australia, and 
came home the next day to find that its mate had 



212 Poets^ Homes. 

killed his wife and child, " The Dog Guard," and 
"Haunted by Tigers."' Then there are "Uncle 
Ned's Tales," soldiers' stories of fighting ; poems 
written for St. Patrick's day and for the Emmet Cen- 
tennial ; and a fierce outburst of wrath published a 
short time ago, when some of his brother Fenians 
were released, some of them only just in time to die. 
The pieces entitled " The Wail of Two Cities," and 
commemorative of the Chicago and Boston fires are 
very good, and the latter was selected by Mr. Long- 
fellow for his " Poems of Places " as the best thing 
written on the subject. It runs thus : 



"O broad breasted Queen among Nations ! 

O mother, so strong in thy youth ! 
Has the Lord looked upon thee in ire, 
And willed thou be chastened with fire. 

Without any ruth ? 

" Has the Merciful tired of His mercy, 
And turned from thy sinning in wrath. 

That the world with raised hands sees and pities 

Thy desolate daughters, thy cities, 
Despoiled on their path ? 

"One year since thy youngest was stricken; 

.Thy eldest lies stricken to-day. 
Ah, God! was thy wrath without pity, 
To tear the strong heart from our city, 

And cast it away? 



y. Boyle O'Reilly. 213 

" O Father, forgive us our doubting ; 

The stain from our weak souls efface ; 
Thou rebukest, we know, but to chasten ; 
Thy hand has but fallen to hasten 

Return to thy grace. 

" Let us rise purified from our ashes, 
As sinners have risen who grieved ; 

Let us show that twice-sent desolation. 

On every true heart in the nation 
Has conquest achieved." 

A few of the songs are freighted with a moral, and 
of these the best ends thus : 

" Like a tide our work should rise, 

Each later wave the best. 
To-day is a king in disguise. 

To-day is the special test. 

" Like a sawyer's work is life, 

The present makes the flaw ; 
And the only field for strife 

Is the nich before the saw." 

There is only one more thing to be told about Mr. 
O'Reilly, and that is, the reason why, for the last few 
years, his countrymen have seemed to put more faith 
in him than in anyone else. It is not his poetry or 
his patriotism that has won him this regard, although 
both count for much with Irishmen. Higher than 
genius, more difficult in the tasks that it imposes than 
devotion to one's country, is the unselfishness that 
can give up wealth without a hope of reward. And 
Mr. O'Reilly has shown, and is showing, that he pos- 
sesses that gift. * 



214 Poets' Homes. 

When the Pilot fell into his hands and the Arch- 
bishop's, its former owner was indebted to hundreds 
of poor persons, and, having lost all his property, had 
no hope of paying them. But the prelate and the 
poet assumed the task, and the profits of the paper, 
instead of going to its rightful owners, are used for 
defraying the claims of these poor creditors. Is it 
any wonder that, throughout the diocese of Boston; 
the Archbishop is regarded with double reverence , 
and that next to him, in the hearts and the prayers 
of the poor, stands John Boyle O'Reilly, the poet ? 



REV. DR. S. F. SMITH. 




y* O AMUEL 
v^— / Francis 
Smith, the author 
of our National 
Hymn " America," 
was born at the 
North End, Boston, 
under the sound of 
old Christ Church 
chimes, October 21, 
1808. He attended 
the Latin School, from which, in 1825, (having been 
a medal scholar) he entered Harvard College, in the 
same class with Oliver Wendell Holmes, the late 
Judges B. R. Curtis and G. T. Bigelow, James Free- 
man Clarke, and Chandler Robbins. Josiah Quincy 
became President of the College in their last 
215 



THE FAVORITE CORNKR. 



2i6 Poets' Homes. 

year. George Ticknor was one of their teachers, 
and Charles Sumner (1830), John Lothrop Motley 
and Wendell Phillips (183 1) were in the classes 
next below them, Mr. Smith passed from Cam- 
bridge to the Andover Theological Seminary, in 
the beautiful town of that name. This was an out- 
growth of the famous Phillips Academy, at whose 
centenary, last summer. Dr. Holmes delivered the 
poem, and about which he and others have, of late 
years, told such interesting stories. Professor Stuart 
and his early colleagues in the Seminary were then at 
the height of their usefulness and fame. In the class 
above Mr. Smith was the since renowned theologian, 
Professor Park ; in the class that entered next, the 
late Professor Hackett. 

Upon graduating, in 1832, Mr. Smith engaged for 
a year in editorial labor. He was ordained to the 
ministry in February, 1834, and went to Waterville, 
Me., preaching as pastor in the Baptist church, and 
becoming Professor of Modern Languages in the 
college there. After eight years thus spent, he moved 
to the village of Newton Centre, Mass., which has 
ever since been his home. For seven years he was 
editor of the "Christian Review," and for twelve 3^ears 
and a half, until July, 1854, he was a pastor there. 

During his subsequent residence he has been occu- 




REV. DR. S. F. SMITH. 



Rev. Dr. S. F. Smith. 



219 



pied in general literary pursuits, and in editorial labor, 
largely in the service of Christian Missions, to which 
he has also seen a useful and honored son devote 
himself in India. 

Mr. Edwin P. Whipple has observed that : "Some 
of the most popular and most quoted poems in our 
literature are purely accidental hits, and their authors 
are rather nettled than pleased that their other pro- 
ductions should be neglected while such prominence 
is given to one " — instancing T. W. Parsons, and his 
" Lines on a Bust of Dante." It was once intimated 
to me by a member of Dr. Smith's family, not that the 
author of "America" desired prominence for other 
strokes of his pen, but that he was sometimes a little 
weary with that accorded to the one which is so often 
and so heartily sung. But Dr. Smith has probably 
settled down to his fate, with which, indeed, it would 
be particularly vain to strive, since the frequent occa- 
sions of using the national hymn furnished by the 
war, have been so quickly followed by those of patri- 
totic centenary observances. Very appropriately.^ too, 
the effort to save the Old South has enlisted our 
poets, drawing attention to the history of some of their 
early famous poems, and thus seated these all the 
more firmly in popular interest. 

Long will be remembered, by all who were so fortu- 



220 Poets' Homes. 

nate as to attend it, the entertainment given in those 
old walls, on the evening of May 4th, 1877. Gover- 
nor Rice presided, and Mrs. Julia Ward Howe, Ralph 
Waldo Emerson, and Drs. J. F. Clarke, S. F. Smith, 
and O. VV. Holmes, the three college classmates, read 
and spoke on the occasion. 

Dr. Smith told the story of "America." The late 
Mr. William C. Woodbridge, he said, brought from 
Germany many years ago, a number of books used in 
schools there, containing words and music, and com- 
mitted them to the late Dr. Lowell Mason, who placed 
them in Dr. Smith's hands, asking him to translate 
anything he might find worthy, or, if he preferred, to 
furnish original words to such of the music as might 
please him. It was among this collection that on a 
gloomy February day in 1832, the student at Ando- 
ver found its present music for the song he had there 
composed in that year. It may here be observed that 
much discussion has occurred in England, within a 
year, as to the origin of this air, which, in 1815, it is 
said, served for the national anthem in England, in 
Prussia and in Russia, it being superseded in the 
latter country only about a generation ago. " Like 
the English constitution," remarked the Daily News, 
"it has gone through a series of developments, and 
such a history is not unbecoming in the case of a truly 



Rev. Dr. S. F. Smith. 221 

national air." It has sometimes been claimed that 
Handel composed and introduced it into England, 
but the researches of Chappell, and of the Germans, 
Fink and Chrysander, Handel's biographer, agree in 
ascribing the original strain to the Englishman, Henry 

Carey (169 1743), who has another title to fame 

in the authorship of " Sally in our Alley." 

Before Dr. Smith fulfilled his part on the pro- 
gramme at the Old South entertainment, by reciting 
''America," he said that on returning from a year's 
wandering in Europe, some time since, he was asked 
if any country had supplanted his own in his regard. 
To this inquiry he read to the audience a poetical 
reply entitled "My Native Land." It contains six 
stanzas, of which the following are the first and third : 



\Vc wander far o'er land and sea 

We seek the old and new, 
We try the lowly and the great, 

The many and the few ; 
O'er states at hand and realms remote, 

With curious quest we roam, 
But find the fairest spot on earth 

Just in our native home. 



222 Poets' Homes. 

We seek for landscapes fair and grand, 

Seen through sweet summer haze, 
Helvetia's mountains, piled with snow, 

Italia's sunset rays. 
And lake, and stream, and crag, and dell, 

And new and fairer flowers — 
We own them rich and fair — but not 

More grand, more fair than ours. 

These stanzas have been given as a natural preface 
to a slight sketch of Dr. Smith's surroundings in the 
town where he dwells j for though he speaks in them 
of the beauties of his whole countrj'-, yet it may well 
be believed that the landscape charms of Newton 
Centre, as well as nearly forty years of residence 
there, conspire to make it for him the dearest spot of 
the land. 

The landscape tempts us out of doors, but first we 
will glance about the poet's home. Leaving tiie parlor 
we cross the hall and pass into a drawing room, in 
rear of which is a side-entrance passage, beyond 
which is another pleasant apartment. In the 
rear of the room first entered, containing various 
interesting souvenirs of European travel, and one 
book-case, is the library proper, which has its walls, 
where the books allow them to be seen at all, covered 
with a warm scarlet paper. The heat diffused over 



Rev. Dr. S. F. Sinith. 225 

the house by a furnace, can at any time, for comfort or 
delight, be reinforced by the open fires which poets 
especially love for their reveries. Whoever is wel- 
comed to the dining-room of this hospitable home will 
find good cheer and quaint china. The mention of 
the last recalls to me that in the parlor is a relic of 
that possessed by Charles Sumner, and given to Dr. 
Smith by his friend the Hon. William Claflin. When 
Dr. Smitli alluded, in his modest wa\', to the atten- 
tions paid him in his visit to Washington in October, 
1S77, about which I had read in the papers, I could 
only think, ''Who, if not he, should be an honored 
guest in the capital of the nation ?" 

Certainly there is no other man among us whose 
words are so often read and sung east and west, north 
and south — thrilling all the instincts of patriotism. 
The study is full of interesting objects. The 
large picture suspended above the open grate is 
a very old and beautiful painting of the IJoly Family 
by one of the old masters — j^robably a Murillo — in 
excellent preservation. The stone lion on the right 
side of the grate is a carving, a foot and a half in 
height, brought from the steps of an idol temple in 
Burmah, where it stood guard in former years. On 
the opposite side is a reclining Buddh, of polished 
marble, rare and very beautiful, from the same coun- 



226 Poets' Homes. 

try. On the top of the bookcase on the opposite side 
of the library is a small, but very fine, bust of Milton ; 
on the right, a massive elephant's tooth, and on 
the left, the skull of a man-eating tiger, which in 
his life time was known to have feasted on the flesh of 
several victims. On one of the two bookcases on 
the intermediate side of the library is a sitting 
Buddh, carved in white marble. The tall, old-fash- 
ioned clock in one of the corners has been an 
heir-loom in the family a hundred and fifteen years. 
The most-used chair in the room was the property, 
more than a hundred years ago, of a clergyman 
of the northern part of Middlesex county. The 
straw chair with projecting arms did service several 
years in the town of Rangoon in Burmah. A very 
beautiful slipper, of Dresden china, does duty as a 
pen-holder on the centre-table. Engravings cover 
most of the walls not hidden by the bookcases ; the 
most interesting being Pere Hyacinthe and Heng- 
stenberg, the commentator on the Psalms. 

This dwelling " hath a pleasant seat." It faces the 
east, is moderately retired from the street, and is upon 
an elevation gently rising for some distance, up which 
sweeps, in a graceful curve, the public road. Follow- 
ing this in its descent, and then almost to the top of 
a lesser acclivity, one comes to a rural church ideally 



Rev. Dr. S. F. SmM. 229 

situated, and forming, amid its trees, an attractive 
sight across the pretty vale from the northern side of 
Dr. Smith's home. This view is English in its quiet 
grace and natural beauty. 

Returning now by the road, and going on past the 
house again, a spacious village green is passed, and 
you come to another church, the one over which Dr. 
Smith was many years settled, fit in position to glad- 
den an American George Herbert. It is embowered 
in a corner where roads cross on the broad plain 
from which rises, on the left of the main road we have 
trodden, a long and high hill. This is crowned by 
the buildings of the Newton Theological Institution 
of which the Rev. Dr. Hovey is President. One who 
toils up the winding tree-lined avenue, will be reward- 
ed by reaching an eminence which will bear compari- 
son with that where was once the old Ursuline Con- 
vent of Charlestown, or with Andover's plateau and 
elegant shades, or the delightful crests of Amherst. 
On the west, the view is particularly fine. Dr. Hackett 
used to compare it to that from the Acropolis of 
Athens. On the horizon rise Monadnock and Wachu- 
sett, with many a town and village between. At 
your foot are the churches and a beautiful little sheet 
of water, which, with the mount on which we are 
standing, gives the situation some claim to be regard- 



230 Poets' Homes. 

ed as an American miniature "Lake District." Sail- 
ing or rowing out upon it, and looking up the heiglit, 
the scene is German or Italian in its bold and roman- 
tic character. The hues in the stone of the chapel, 
and its architecture, embracing a heavy tower, give it, 
set upon the wooded hill, an air of age, and recall 
the castle sites on Como, or one of those still inhabit- 
ed religious establishments which rise upon the banks 
of the Danube. 

Not very far from the water is the former home of 
Dr. Hackett, and following west the road upon which 
it lies, towards Brooklawn, the country-seat of Gov. 
Claflin, the traveller first comes to the portal of the 
cemetery in which the scholar now reposes. Dr. 
Smith has chosen a final resting place here among 
the urns of this and other friends. Sure we are that 
none could wish for them, or for himself, a fairer spot 
to rest one's head upon the lap of earth. It is a good 
place for the dawn of the immortal morning on him 
v.'ho wrote, years ago, " The morning light is break- 
ing." 

There is little, in meeting Dr. Smith, to remind one 
of such thoughts ; but, in four years more, the famous 
Harvard class of " Twenty-nine," will have sung the 
words, " My Country, 'tis of thee," a half-century, 
and Dr. Holmes is beginning to speak of his own 



Rev. Dr. S. F. Smi/h. 



231 



failing voice. Gently may he and his classmates fail 
and fade from their activities, distant yet be the day 
when those who knew him of whom tins paper has 
spoken, shall stand and muse : — 

Here lies who hymned America ; to sing or preach, 
Dante's suggestive words our question's tribute teach, 
Where was " a better smith of the maternal speech ? " 



Since the main part of this was written, Dr. Smith's 
home has lost one who, for nearly forty years, was its 
honored and beloved inmate. Mrs. Ann W. Smith, 

the mother of 
his wife, died 
August 20th, 
1878. Born 
July 28, 1786, 
a sister of the 
eminent judge* 
the late Hon. 
Daniel Apple- 
ton White, and 
married almost 
seventy years 
since, this venerable lady carried one's thoughts back 
to the early days of the elder Quincy and Webster, 
Dana and Bryant, and Madame Patterson Bonaparte. 




OUTSIDE THE STUDY WINDOW. 



232 Pods' Ho77ies. 

At ninety-two, however, her interest in life was keen, 
and her beauty of spirit, fitly enshrined in a noble 
figure, looked forth from a face round, full and fair. 
The writer will ever remember the honor ancf pleasure 
of handing Madame Smith to breakfast, in her son- 
in-law's home, two months previous to her death, jlist 
before the family left Newton for their cottage by the 
sea. It was there, where she was accustomed to 
bathe with much zest, that, a few weeks later, she had 
a fall which soon proved fatal to the body, and freed 
the soul, of the aged Christian. 

G. H. Whittemore. 



716 



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